On his first album in nine years, the Los Angeles trumpeter-composer sounds like he’s remixing himself, taking apart his past 40 years of work and reassembling it for the present moment.

Jon Hassell: Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)

While it’s been nine years since his last full-length, 2009’s Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, Jon Hassell has not been completely absent from record shelves or streaming playlists. Several of the Los Angeles trumpeter, composer, and ambient godfather’s canonical albums have been reissued during that stretch, including a fantastic expanded edition of 1990’s hip-hop-influenced City: Works of Fiction and a remastered re-release of his swampy, cinematic fourth album, 1981’s Dream Theory in Malaya, helping reintroduce his smeared, fluid tones and colorful soundscapes to a new generation of listeners.
Hassell’s influence is increasingly apparent across younger generations of artists, too. Destroyer’s last couple of albums have made great use of Hassell-like trumpet treatments, and artists like Visible Cloaks and Sam Gendel are marking ambient compositions with similar touches of Eastern percussion or hazy electro-acoustic processing. Last year, Glasgow’s Optimo Music issued a compilation of material from Hassell and artists in his orbit, like the UK post-industrial duo O Yuki Conjugate and reclusive Spanish experimental musician Javier Segura, that filtered age-old musical ideas from around the world through a contemporary technological aesthetic. All of it fit neatly under the umbrella of “Fourth World,” a category that Hassell coined for his work alongside Brian Eno on 1980’s Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics.
The door, then, has been open for Hassell to return, and Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One), his new album and the first on his Warp sublabel Ndeya, sounds like it has benefited from its extended gestation period. Its eight tracks are teeming with strands of melody and unbound rhythms that have been meticulously constructed into groaning towers of sound. The material fits perfectly into the continuum of Hassell’s entire career and steps beyond the cozy, hypnagogic compositions that made up Last Night. Where that album felt like an extended period of deep, restorative slumber, Listening to Pictures takes us slowly from that state into a stretch of twitchy, eyes-darting REM sleep. Even as many of the tracks on this new album soothe, they are still marked by a flickering, hallucinatory energy, built around stuttering beats that flood the stereo field through which little phrases of trumpet, synth, piano, and violin poke through.
Sometimes those elements are clear and direct, as on the bulbous “Ndeya,” where Hassell’s trumpet, a Rhodes electric piano, and Kheir-Eddine M’Kachiche’s violin play a series of halting refrains intercut with drones. But more frequently Hassell processes everything through effects pedals and computer until it blurs, to impressionistic effect. While “Al Kongo Udu” is underpinned by a quietly humming string section and a batucada-style drum pattern, the attention diverts to electronic pulses and whines that recall a broken cell-phone connection. “Pastorale Vassant” centers on a field recording of a gamelan that Hassell captured on the island of Mallorca, but it is nearly overwhelmed by the drunken bass notes and fluttering racket going on around it, in a manner similar to the dizzying spirit of his 1986 ECM debut, Power Spot.
This music may sound chaotic, but there’s a clear logic and structure to what Hassell has created on Listening to Pictures. That includes his well-chosen album title, a reference to a style of painting where traces of earlier versions of the artwork remain visible in the finished product. It’s possible to discern a double meaning here: not only the layering that distinguishes each song but also the way that echoes of the composer’s last 40 years of work swirl together in the new material. It feels like he’s constantly remixing himself, taking apart ideas from as far back as his 1978 debut Earthquake Island and using new technology to augment and re-contextualize them for the present era. In a perfect Fourth World twist, the music remains entirely grounded in the now while also sounding like it’s been floating in the cosmos for eons.


Nominally working under the umbrella of dubstep, this London producer has called his music "R&B concrète"-- a celebration of the abstract and the pop.

Splazsh

One of the upshots of dance music's active compartmentalization-- into genres and subgenres and niches aligned with certain kinds of basslines or BPM-- is the exalted space it affords work that jams the system. If an album proves unique, we celebrate it. And then that album makes us think all the more scrupulously about the system it happened to jam. Actress's Splazsh is one of those albums. Actress-- a DJ/producer from London named Darren Cunningham-- slots into a recognizable realm of artists working in the wake of dubstep. But little, if anything, in his sound shares much with dubstep as it's most often understood. His bass isn't very big, his snares don't crack in isolation, his atmospheres don't heave in the air of cavernous negative-space.
So what's the link? A certain formal seriousness and rigor-- a sense of tracks transpiring the way they do for reasons owing to some kind of project, whatever that project (probably rhythmic and arcane) may be. But such talk downplays the many visceral thrills of Splazsh. Even the subtle stuff has an immediate effect: By the end of its sneakily weird eight minutes, opener "Hubble" has gently pushed the album into a sort of spinning motion that speeds up and slows down, but never quite stops. The slow-motion speed lets Actress throw in an array of sounds he'll sort through in time: woozy ambient waves, dry drums, crazy lasers, a slow synth arpeggio that sounds lifted from some old grainy sci-fi movie.
And so Splazsh keeps spinning, even as it moves through floaty dreamscapes strewn with sighs and chimes ("Lost") and austere breakbeat abstractions ("Get Ohn [Fairlight Mix]"). There's almost nothing that ties such disparate tracks together, except for everything. And that everything owes to the simultaneous sense of adventure and control that has made Actress one of the most intriguing electronic-music makers at work today.
Actress himself has called his music "R&B concrète," and that helps illuminate the way he works from both inside and outside a track. He has an ear for building up a song from the bottom (like a pop producer) and then abstracting it from the top (like a musique concrète technician), so that he makes some incredibly strange sounds surprisingly palatable-- and without making a big show of their strangeness. In that, Actress shares a certain allegiance with post-dubstep artists like Zomby (who has made records for the label that Actress runs, Werk Discs). But there's a range of hooks and ideas at play in Splazsh that few others have approached, much less made coherent.


The new record from 1960s hitmaker Glen Campbell is intended as his last. It’s a pleasant postscript, collecting covers of Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, among others.

Adiós

Glen Campbell bid a public farewell in 2012, playing his last concert roughly a year after he announced he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Improbably, the illness provided a coda to Campbell’s career; he quickly released four albums, culminating with this year’s Adiós. Considering his debilitating illness, this productivity is remarkable. But it has also been noteworthy as Campbell’s longest stretch of secular records since 1993’s Somebody Like That. He spent the next 15 years in a wilderness of Christian music and re-recordings before reemerging in 2008 with Meet Glen Campbell, an album designed to evoke memories of his plush 1960s hits while relying on songs from modern rockers. The skillful balance of relatively contemporary tunes—Paul Westerberg’s “Sadly, Beautiful” may have been old enough to drive by the time Campbell cut it—and classic production created the template for Campbell’s final years.
Like 2011’s Ghost on the Canvas, Adiós sounds as rich and detailed as any of his ’60s work, but that’s not the only similarity they share. Ghost on the Canvas was also billed as Campbell’s final album, but its supporting farewell tour did well enough to produce a documentary—I’ll Be Me, released in 2014 accompanied by a soundtrack album—and to convince Campbell and his team that the singer could record one more album, Adiós. It’s difficult to discern the precise sense of agency Campbell has had with any of the music he’s recorded while suffering from Alzheimer’s. All of these records allude to the idea of mortality. The very titles of Ghost on the Canvas and 2013’s See You There suggest Campbell has already left this world; I’ll Be Me’s new song “I’m Not Gonna Miss You” is a direct reference to his loss of memory.
Adiós doesn’t hard sell Campbell’s impending death as aggressively as its predecessors, but his imminent departure hangs over the proceedings, articulated clearly in its album title and surfacing on the margins via covers of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” Mortality may be pushed toward the surface on Adiós, but this is an album intended to convey happiness, not darkness. Look at the artwork, which depicts a cheery, chipper Campbell. It’s a far cry from the spectre looming on the cover of Ghost on the Canvas, the fatalistic block type of See You There, or the haunted younger photo gracing I’ll Be Me. Adiós seemingly intends to offer a hopeful spin to a tragic story.
It succeeds, to an extent. Certainly, it offers comfort in a way none of its companion records do. Producer Carl Jackson picks up the throwback sensibility of Julian Raymond and Howard Willing—the pair who produced Meet Glen Campbell and Ghost on the Canvas—so Adiós feels like a cousin to Campbell’s lush ’60s and ’70s hits. Such warmth underpins the working thesis that this is the record the singer always wanted to make—the songs he never got around to cutting in his prime—and it also disguises how Campbell’s range has diminished, a welcome move after the stark See You There placed his flaws in the forefront. Here, his voice is just supple enough to lend some sweetness to melodies that demand a gentle touch, many of them written by Jimmy Webb, a songwriter who always brought out the best in Campbell.
Four of Webb’s compositions, all taken from his 1993 album Suspending Disbelief, comprise a third of Adiós. Those songs, along with the Miller tune, are the highlights of the album because they are perched on the precipice of the past and the present. They’re not overly familiar in the vein of the album’s take on “Everybody’s Talkin’”—presented in an arrangement that mimics Harry Nilsson’s hit—or “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” They feel like they could be part of a new Campbell album that lacked any biographical baggage. Of course, such a record couldn’t exist. Campbell’s tragic story is woven into the marketing of Adiós, and the album was indeed created as a last testament from a legend; it is impossible to hear without the context of the rest of his career. Adiós doesn't add much to Campbell’s legacy—the comeback records of recent years formed a fitting final act—but it’s a pleasant postscript, a wistful reminder of the joys a great musician once gave.


Compiled by JD Twitch of the Scottish duo Optimo, *[*Cease and Desist] pulls together recordings by a bunch of desperately alienated British post-punk bands and one-offs into a remarkable, eye-opening and ingeniously sequenced album.

Various Artists: [Cease & Desist] DIY! (Cult classics from the Post-Punk era 1978 - 82)

The British D.I.Y. scene that arose in the wake of punk had a weird relationship with mainstream pop, one that continues to this day: This compilation was originally supposed to be called Now That's What I Call DIY!, until Sony inspired its new name. The records compiled here by JD Twitch of the Scottish DJ duo Optimo weren't exactly a genre at the time, but they had an ideology in common. Punk rock's Pistols/Jam/Clash wave had made a lot of noise about overturning musical orthodoxy, but it was pretty much a single kind of noise. The D.I.Y. bands made it their business to overturn every received idea about songs and recordings: rehearsed harmoniousness, formal structures, polish of any kind. But they did like to dance, or at least bounce, and some of them liked tunes, too. None of the artists on [Cease & Desist] DIY! were ever, ever going to make it onto the charts--or so they figured at the time--but they wanted it to be known that they weren't rejecting pop values out of ignorance.
If you were looking for these sorts of records fifteen or twenty years ago, when anybody other than collectors still had them, you'd paw through 7-inch bins from which the Buzzcocks and Young Marble Giants singles had already been nabbed. The sound came almost exclusively from England in the years of this compilation's subtitle. Its record sleeves were predominantly monochrome, or black and white and pink, although silkscreened artwork (as with the sole release by Sara Goes Pop, from which "Sexy Terrorist" is taken here) was also acceptable. Uneven Letraset type, or handwritten band names and song titles, are a good sign; so are record labels with names like Fuck Off Records and It's War Boys, and what-were-they-thinking band names. The Spunky Onions' "How I Lost My Virginity", for instance, comes from their "split single" with the Ghettoberries, who were of course the same group.
Twitch's sequence bends the usual rules for scene compilations. It's not all obscure artists—Thomas Leer, whose electropop single "Private Plane" appears here, went on to be half of the super-slick new wave band Act. Instead of surveying as many bands as possible, it includes two different tracks by the cunningly named Distributors: "TV Me," a sort of answer song to the Normal's "T.V.O.D.", and a curdled dub piece called "Never Never". It even ventures a bit outside of its own time range: a 1984 album track by the 012 is gerrymandered in on the grounds that it was recorded in 1981.
All of those turn out to be fine decisions on Twitch's part, because [Cease & Desist]  manages to pull together recordings by a bunch of desperately alienated artists into a remarkable, eye-opening and ingeniously sequenced album. It's arranged into four four-song suites (there's no CD version of the album, but there is a double LP), each with a distinct focus. The first side is four stone classics featuring piping-voiced women singers; three of its four bands are by splinter projects of the Homosexuals (whose 1978 "Hearts In Exile" single is a fountain from which a lot of this music springs).
In particular, "C'est Fab", a 1982 single credited to Nancy Sesay and the Melodaires—a Homosexuals-related group never heard from before or since—justifies this compilation's existence all by itself. It's a struggle for supremacy between a rhythm section that's trying to play crisp, bouncy funk and musicians who are doing their utmost to derail it (a singer squeaking uncertainly and out of tune at the very top of her range, an out-of-control trumpeter streaking through the studio, a male chorus with comedy accents, somebody dropping in cascades of fist-hammered dub piano). Everybody ends up winning.
That's followed by a set of tracks that use the materials of synth-pop to build weirder and more obsessive structures than the stuff that was starting to turn up on the charts. (The highlight there is Dorothy's "Softness", an uncanny, close-miked spoken piece whose backing band includes both Genesis P-Orridge and Alex Fergusson, shortly before they formed Psychic TV.) The album's third side begins with three pieces inspired by the messiest extremes of Jamaican dub--a huge influence on that generation of British musicians--and ends with a song that recalls dub more or less by accident: the slow, sneering 1978 single "Violence Grows", by a wobbly band of teenagers called "Fatal" Microbes, fronted by a monomaniacal-sounding then-14-year-old who went by the name Honey Bane. (By the end of 1981, she would have a legitimate UK Top 40 single of her own, "Turn Me On Turn Me Off".)
The final suite of [Cease & Desist] highlights the D.I.Y. scene's connections to the punk rock sound and ethos that made it possible. In another compilation's context, actually, the Fakes' "Look Out" and the Prats' "Disco Pope" would just seem like ineptly performed punk songs, which arguably they were. But the genius of D.I.Y. was that it made any bug a feature: these records' aesthetic framed every off-key vocal or mangled rhythm as a rebellion against the boredom of sonic orthodoxy, and they are never for an instant boring.


As the Atlanta rapper’s court case continues, this scrappy project is all the more compelling for its loose, improvisatory structure.

Business Is Business

A third of the way through Business Is Business, the record Young Thug released with little warning during his 14th month behind bars as he awaits trial following a 56-count RICO indictment in his native Georgia, comes “Wit Da Racks.” The song leverages his keen pop instincts and elastic eccentricities at once. Nominally about the most banal part of being a famous rapper—the chorus is built around Thug summoning a club owner to pay him for a walkthrough appearance—his madcap opening verse expands, contracts, and contorts, beginning with a cascade of syllables that matches the “waterfall” shimmer of his jewelry.
But by its end, those nods to dull wealth grow syntactically strange: “What’s on your wrist?/Million,” he raps, the last word enjambed with the question. He brags of having beautiful women “to kick it with,” where all the emphasis is on the elongated “iiiiiiiiiit.” He’s zen about chain snatchings—he’s sure he’ll get his back—and calls girls “suburban” for having pretty toes. But the oddest thing Thug says is that “every album got no skippin’”: odd not because his LPs are padded with filler, but because there’s never been any sense that Thug thinks of his catalog in those discrete, contractually measurable terms.
I have no firsthand knowledge of the way Thug works, and what details we have been given by his collaborators—producer Dun Deal saying he once asked to see the sheet of paper Thug was holding while he recorded, only to be shown “weird signs and shapes” instead of words—seem to get us further from any real insight. Yet from near the beginning of his career, massive hard drive leaks and long delays of hypothetical records have clouded the provenance of the material that is eventually released, while recent album titles (Punk, So Much Fun) suggest icebergs of unreleased music that have been picked apart and organized based on underlying sonic elements. Business Is Business, perhaps due to its nature as a cobbled-together collection from someone who can’t access a recording studio, even to comb through his vaults, frequently recalls Thug’s loosest, most apparently improvisatory work. It’s all the more compelling for it.
This is despite the window dressing of a pop blockbuster. The album is bookended by nakedly commercial plays: the noodling, 90-second Drake turn that begins opener “Parade on Cleveland” and the preamble, from fun.’s Nate Ruess, to closer “Global Access.” Each implies not only chart gamesmanship but—through Drake crooning about a release from prison and a celebration in Atlanta and Ruess singing “They will try and lock you up/Drag your name down through the mud… ’Cause that’s life here in America”—an album that will explicitly address Thug’s legal situation. Beyond the logistical infeasibility, though, is the fact that this has never been the way he writes: Thug’s major themes (an obsession with family, the belief that loving someone else has to compromise or destroy you, being good at robbery) have always come through via triangulation or in muttered asides. Now, A-list guests notwithstanding, asides are all that’s left to assemble a “new” record.
And so the odds and ends become central. Business Is Business is anchored by songs like the plinking “Gucci Grocery Bag,” a beloved leak that’s been kicking around the internet since the beginning of the pandemic, and the Future duet “Cars Bring Me Out,” which takes a Wheezy beat already used by the late Drakeo the Ruler as the setting for crime-luxury vignettes (“Woke up in a mansion/Silk Dior pinstriped couch/Call the car man”) that recall the half-finished Nas narrative songs that used to trickle out to mixtape DJs. In these instances, Thug is rapping upright, animatedly; when he continues the water motif re: his jewels (“Think I’m lying? You can dive in this bitch just like a fish”) he sounds hellbent on convincing you.
Elsewhere he opens up veins, singing about extremes of pain, joy, and paranoia. On the foreboding “Abracadabra,” he follows four bars of wordless harmonizing with “Mistress, mistress, tell me who my mistress is,” the question made to feel as urgent as the quasi-spiritual concerns that come elsewhere. While “Parade on Cleveland” could have been excised, the other Drake collaboration, the exultant “Oh U Went,” joins “Wit Da Racks” as a potential hit, in large part due to Thug’s unique ability to teeter on the tonal knife’s edge that separates sincerity and contempt. But that song’s buoyancy is immediately qualified by what comes next: “Want Me Dead,” where Thug writes with such rawness that it at times feels voyeuristic to listen. “I told my brother, ‘Take this watch, because I’m vulnerable,’” he raps during the hook, adding, “I let her get away with murder when I fall in love,” underlining that notion that love is necessarily a pact of mutually assured destruction. When he sings about unnamed parties wanting him dead, he couples it with his desperation to bring his own departed friends back to this plane; the border starts to seem more than a little porous.
A handful of days after Business Is Business was released, a new version, expanded and resequenced by Metro Boomin, was uploaded to DSPs. The rearrangement is radically superior: It correctly locates the emotional core of the album, opening with the pained but playful “Jonesboro,” then “Mad Dog” and “Uncle M,” a pair of horror-movie themes that are reserved and explosive, respectively. The tension-release pays off with “Want Me Dead”; only then do we rappel up from the depths of Thug’s psyche, onto the silk Dior pinstriped couches. Nate Ruess is deemphasized by a new closing song; the lesser Drake track is buried in the middle. For all the commercial speculation that’s run parallel to what Young Thug has actually been doing on his records, the truth has always been in the scraps, on the fringes.


On an adventurous new album, the shapeshifting indie-rock band blends rave influences with larger-than-life hooks for some of its sharpest songwriting to date.

Pure Music

Strange Ranger emerged from lockdown transformed. With a heavier, more expansive sound, the band’s 2021 mixtape, No Light in Heaven, explored the sustained restlessness and dread of a moment when no one knew what the future would bring. A deafening blast of harsh noise in the opening moments of “In Hell” set the tone for a chaotic new sound as indebted to 1990s rave music as it was to the band’s Pacific Northwest indie-rock roots. The music also seemed to respond to the material realities of the pandemic with a more meticulous approach to digital production, incorporating sequencers, drum machines, and elaborate vocal effects that complemented their palm-muted riffs and larger-than-life choruses.
As pandemic restrictions lifted, the group continued to chase this adventurous spirit with glossy big-beat singles and a steady live presence in their adopted homes of New York and Philadelphia. The two cities’ seemed to collide on their output; as Philadelphia emerged as the regional capital of indie, emo, the “new wave of American shoegaze,” acts like the Dare, Frost Children, and Blaketheman1000 have come to occupy an adjacent place in downtown New York—all while sharing bills with Strange Ranger and contributing club-ready remixes to the expanded edition of No Light in Heaven.
All of this has brought new attention to the project and left Strange Ranger at a fascinating turning point. Yet Pure Music, their first full-length release since No Light in Heaven, doesn’t feel all that far removed from its predecessor; its 10 tracks are built from the same synth pads, drum beats, and narrative structures as before. But where the previous release was consciously divided between its synth-pop experiments and riff-driven alt-rock singles, Pure Music blends the two approaches, as vocalists Issac Eiger and Fiona Woodman sing about the search for inspiration during an extended period of uncertainty. The result is some of the sharpest, most clear-eyed songwriting to date.
Despite the Day-Glo exterior, Pure Music largely operates in a lyrical mode born out of the group’s time as a more conventional guitar-driven project. A dense assemblage of synth pads and arpeggios provide a sturdy foundation for Eiger and Woodman’s voices on “Rain So Hard,” as loose drums and a quivering guitar tone swell to enormous heights in the hook. “I heard you write about culture/What’s that mean?/Is it sort of like everything?,” Eiger sings, voice rising from a soft whisper to a raspy shout. Read as a dismissive exchange between acquaintances at a party, it’s the kind of line that might seem better suited for a pithy 1975 cut, but Eiger’s earnest inflection lends it a wide-eyed charm.
A world-weary sadness persists in spite of these occasional glimmers of humor. It’s present on “Rain So Hard,” where a few moments of miscommunication leave Eiger distraught about a breakup, and his frustration continues on “She’s on Fire,” an anthemic single that doubles as the album’s emotional peak. Synths and sequencers give way to massive drums and a chorus-drenched guitar line akin to the Cure or Cocteau Twins, while Eiger works through his disillusionment, leaning into a soaring rock-radio chorus that feels like a genuine breakthrough. The euphoric moment not only provides the album with its title—“And I could die in pure music”—but it also serves as a mantra for the group in their ongoing search for transcendence. In moments like these, the influence of rave music seems to take on a more personal shape. It isn’t just that songs like “Wide Awake” or “Dazed in the Shallows” tend to sound like Porches by way of Primal Scream, or an old Andrew Weatherall remix of My Bloody Valentine at their most Madchester. Strange Ranger allow every instrument to echo the same gnawing frustration, and eventual insight, at the heart of their songwriting: a sense of purpose that makes their searching feel like a destination in and of itself.


The funeral doom band Lycus make slow and heavy music with bleak lyrics, but the feel of it is surprisingly warm, cathartic, and uplifting. Their new album adds a second guitar and a cellist, and the four songs here have a very big feel.

Chasms

The Oakland band Lycus make funeral doom that's unique and accomplished without rejecting the basic tenets of the style. The music is slow and heavy, the three-part vocals mournful and guttural, the cover art by Italian painter Paolo Girardi melancholic and romantic, the subject matter bleak. For instance, "This wretched body/ The prison of the soul/ Weighted by the chains of depression/ I could never bear to let you in." Or: "Oh Mother/ Oh Father/ Relinquish this mistake of a life." But, all said, it’s also uplifting.
This has a lot to do with the guitars and tone. On the quartet's new album Chasms, fire and heat are mentioned in the lyrics, and even if they show up in a negative sense ("The sun will burn the cancer we have become/ Death will be the savior"), you get the sense of the night turning into day here*.* It was produced by Jack Shirley, who also helmed Deafheaven’s Sunbather and New Bermuda (and a ton of other records), and he gives the songs a very big feel.
Lycus’ first record, 2013’s Tempest, featured three tracks spreading across 42 minutes, though the last one, "Tempest," drifted off at the end with low-level hiss and feedback. The more tightly packed Chasms features four songs in 44 minutes, and each second is fully loaded. From blistering black metal freak-out to crushing Neurosis climax to an unexpected psychedelic undertow, there's no incidental music here.
They added a second guitarist, which brings a compelling texture to the sound, and there’s also the presence of go-to Bay Area metal cellist Jackie Perez Gratz  (Giant Squid, Amber Asylum). She weaves the songs together into a kind of extended suite, and her work brings to mind another of her collaborators, Asunder, who released one of the great underground Bay Area doom albums, Works Will Come Undone, in 2006. Asunder, like Lycus, found a way to make a lot happen with a little.
This is one of my favorite records of the sort since then, which is saying a lot. Lycus maintain a specific atmosphere—deep greens, browns, dark shadows—but find a number of paths through it. Each feels right, the blending of genres and approaches and patterns seamless. More important, though, is the effect music of this sort can have on a listener. It's highly cathartic. It will move you emotionally. At the end of the haunting closer "Obsidian Eyes," which finds the protagnist "suffer[ing] through the void/ On the perilous bridge/ Between body and spirit," the band pushes forward with all their force into a gentle cymbal wash that closes the record. It's one of the few soft moments on Chasms, and it's welcome: a place to rest your head after experiencing this overwhelming, ecstatic, surprisingly meditative album.


In his sparse, instrumental style, the Polish guitarist channels centuries of cultural exchange. His new album is slow and reverent, as if suspended in a different measurement of time.

Talàn

Raphael Rogiński was supposed to be a sculptor, but his guitar got in the way. He practiced more than he slept; blood “was pouring” from his fingers, he told the Polish publication Polityka in 2015. He tore at his instrument “like wild meat, shamelessly and greedily.” These days, there’s not a trace of aggression in the Polish guitarist’s music. His playing is considered, graceful, meditative. Every effortless run is followed by a contemplative pause; his rubato sensibility suggests someone treading on uneven ground, deliberating over their next footstep. If you were him, you might pause too, because there is a numinous power in his instrumental songs—enchanted, uncanny, swarming with ghosts. His music is a dark forest inhabited by shadows and sprites and unseen forces. His playing feels like a spell designed to keep a forager safe while honoring the wild unknown.
Before he ever picked up the guitar, a pre-teen Rogiński, who grew up on the wooded outskirts of Warsaw, played an Uzbek kemenche, a three-stringed lyre, given to him by his grandmother. He played it without the bow, pulling and plucking as though it were a banjo. You can detect traces of that initiation in his playing still; he often sounds like he is manipulating some other, stranger instrument than his Gibson ES-335. Maybe his grandmother’s kemenche unlocked something in him. She was Tatar, a Turkic ethnic group with roots around Lake Baikal that is today found across Central Asia and Eastern Europe, all the way to the Black Sea. Rogiński once recalled of his grandmother: “As we ate raw meat, I timidly looked into her eyes, and saw the Scythian steppes and beyond. It was my first experience of meditation.”
Much of Rogiński’s music has concerned itself with channeling spirits from the past. His group Shofar—named after the ritual horn blown on Rosh Hashanah, and associated with the resurrection of the dead—is dedicated to the excavation of traditional Jewish music, particularly the Hasidic mystical songs called nigunim. His finest album until now, Raphael Rogiński Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes. African Mystic Music, distilled its inspirations into an ethereal and otherworldly form, a kind of anti-gravity blues. His new album Talàn picks up the spare, beguiling style of that recording and extends it. The record is dedicated to the Black Sea; many of its songs were written in Odesa, a Ukrainian port city defined by its historical mixture of cultures, and the gateway from Asia to Europe for some of Rogiński’s own ancestors. Across Talàn, that history of exchange plays out in eerie runs, folk melodies that feel like ancient wisdom, textures of dusty pages and worn stone.
These are simple songs, played on unaccompanied guitar with no apparent edits and few effects, save for occasional tremolo or slap-back echo. They transmit a powerful sense of presence, as though you were in the same room as Rogiński. The squeaking of his fingers is audible on the strings; the lengthy spaces between the notes allow for a rudimentary kind of echolocation, mapping the position and thickness of the walls, the height of the ceiling. It is not jazz, but he borrows that genre’s exploratory sense of structure, beginning each track with a simple exposition of the theme, then moving outward in increasingly slanted abstractions. His style of fingerpicking, plucking out basslines with his thumb and answering with skeletal melodies on the upper strings, often resembles two players in conversation; it took me many listens—and a video of him playing—to be convinced there were no overdubs involved.
The opening “Listopad,” Polish for “November,” encapsulates the album’s abiding melancholy in a dejected melodic figure that shifts unpredictably, like dry leaves on pavement. Most of Rogiński’s melodies have the elusive quality of something dancing on the tip of your tongue—they feel intuitive, yet try to sing one back, and you probably can’t. The closer you peer at them, the more they crumble. The guitar’s tone is muted and muffled, but also swollen, heavy on midrange and bass; it gives the impression of a surfeit of signal, slightly more than the circuit can carry. In “Cliffs and the Sea,” delay sloshes back and forth like water in an overflowing glass; in “Flickering Glances,” his dampened taps sound like dented steel pans. Occasionally, he’ll brush the strings beneath the bridge, unleashing bright streaks of dissonance against the midnight blue of his chords. His technique is unusual, but it is never show-offy; his songs always sound like they are trying to communicate, however wordlessly, some piece of wisdom, some essential knowledge handed down over generations.
But these details all come into focus later, after hours spent inside this music. The first thing you hear, the main thing, is its sadness. The melancholy is vast, though never maudlin; his playing is too mercurial, his harmonic choices too unpredictable, ever to lapse into sentimentalism. The word “talàn” can be translated as “maybe”; Rogiński says that it is a “very old” word, dating back to nomadic peoples who lived in Central Asia nearly 3,000 years ago. For the guitarist, that “maybe” implies a choice: “I take something in order to lose something else,” he says. Or, put another way, to carry one thing is to leave behind what doesn’t fit in the saddlebags. To follow one path is to abandon the others. In these repetitive, ruminative songs, I hear different ways of considering time, ways at odds with digital clocks and algorithmic models—cycles and seasons, strange mutations and sudden revelations. Handcrafted, fallible, as mindful as a walk on a mountain path, they sound like tributes to all the things steamrolled by modernity. Slow and reverent, they communicate a sense of incalculable loss.


The French ambient producer uses the ocean’s duality of stillness and turbulence as inspiration to produce music that ebbs and flows eternally.

Palaces of Pity EP

Music is a temporal art form, a medium bound to a linear experience. Russian composer Igor Stravinsky described music as a chrononomy: a measuring tool for time. Yet some musicians can achieve a sense of infinitude in their sound by mimicking nature’s eternal characteristics. Laurie Spiegel’s endless arpeggiated synths flow like rivers, Lubomyr Melnyk’s cacophonous piano compositions blow like torrential winds, and Alice Coltrane’s rolled harp chords expand endlessly like our universe. On Palaces of Pity, French producer Malibu suggests boundlessness by embodying the expansivity of the ocean. Submerged synths undulate like waves folding into themselves, producing a sense of agonizing solitude that feels like drifting in a lifeboat with no land in sight. The sound begs you to slow down and stare into the horizon, squinting to find out just how far you can see before the world goes blurry.
In the years since her 2019 debut One Life, Malibu, whose legal name is Barbara Braccini, has developed her oceanic sound. On her monthly NTS radio show, United in Flames, she treats songs by Madonna, Dean Blunt, or Enigma like water-soluble compounds, dousing them with reverb until they dissolve into a sea of sound. In 2021 she morphed Himera and Petal Supply’s hyperpop banger “You Make It Look So Easy (S.M.I.L.E.Y)” into a heart-wrenching ballad, and earlier this year she released “Idle Citi,” a seven-minute collaboration with Swedish instrumentalist and vocalist Merely featuring seagull calls and the sound of thunder. Braccini, whose father was an oceanographer, has made the ocean her muse, using its duality of stillness and turbulence as inspiration to produce music that ebbs and flows eternally.
Palaces of Pity harbors the emotions you hold onto, willingly or not. There are few intelligible lyrics, most notably the voice in “Cheirosa ’94” that asks, “Can you feel it? When I look at you I feel it too.” Most of the album is narrated by longing moans that beckon like sirens. Braccini expands on this isolated yearning by building depth with distance. Ominous bass stabs mimic a faraway thunderclap on “The Things That Fade” and gull-like synths chirp in the skies above “So Far Out of Love.” Braccini has described the album as a sequel to One Life, which was inspired by the loss of a friendship. Palaces of Pity in turn represents the feeling of distant trauma, the way pain may fade from the surface while remaining within you.
Malibu’s music is as formless as water. Sounds creep into the picture with long attacks, slowly building into a frothy crest before dissipating into a silent trough, only to reincarnate as a new wave. “The Things That Fade” begins with a windy synth that moves from ear to ear while Braccini coos in Auto-Tune. A bass synth momentarily submerges everything underwater before her moans break the surface and the synths begin building once more. Along the way various instruments—cellos, guitars, mallets—appear like seasick hallucinations. These oscillating dynamics can be disorienting because they suggest a non-linear experience, perhaps the gradual and irregular process of healing.
By referencing the constant characteristics of the ocean, Braccini approaches a world where music can live outside of time. “Illiad,” the final track, is a nine-minute soundscape that feels like falling forever. It begins with overlapping voices, one cooing, another crying. As the vocals vanish the music settles into a descending three-note melody, conjuring the feeling of sinking into water, and a whale-like call reminds you that you’re not alone. Then a delayed synth begins to dance over the melody, like streaks of light piercing the surface. The song fades so slowly that it feels like you’ll never reach the ocean floor. Perhaps, in the Earth’s deepest waters, you can sink for eternity.


The standout track from Born Like This gets the remix EP treatment, with work from Thom Yorke, Dave Sitek, and Jneiro Jarel.

Gazzillion Ear EP

After the better part of a year's worth of listening, it's not out of the question to call "Gazzillion Ear" the standout track from DOOM's Born Like This. At the very least, it's one of the album's most attention-grabbing cuts. J Dilla's hauntological tour of the 2000s' second half manifested itself here as a fused-together unearthing of two of his archived beats: the organ-driven psych-soul "Dig It" and the "Return of the 'G'"-gone-lo-fi Moroderisms of "Phantom of the Synths". DOOM united those two movements with a tour de force rendition of his characteristic hookless, free-associative pop-culture cliché-disemboweling that stands up to any of the top three verses on Madvillainy. And even through the rawness, he rode on that beat so securely that even without the Dilla shoutouts it'd be a fool's errand to separate his voice from it.
Not that Thom Yorke or Dave Sitek or Jneiro Jarel are fools, of course-- it's just that they have their work cut out for them when it comes to remixing this song. The Gazzillion Ear EP includes the Yorke remix that accompanied the iTunes release of Born Like This, a collaboration between Sitek and Jarel, and another Jarel mix created under his "Dr. Who Dat?" guise. The EP also includes the original track, largely for completion's sake, and a brief, shrugworthy bonus beat entitled "The.Green.Whore.Net"; it's probably for the best that most people who already own Born Like This (by which I mean pretty much anyone who would already be interested in "Gazzillion Ear" in any context) can pick this one up piecemeal.
While Yorke's remix doesn't supplant the original, it doesn't bother to try-- in fact, it doesn't even use the same vocal track. DOOM's flow on the Yorke remix is both faster-spitting and more intense, a reserved yet intimidating raspiness on some Clint Eastwood business. It's also split up, giving his lyrics some breathing room, but part of the appeal of "Gazzillion Ear" is that DOOM just goes nonstop, so hearing his voice drop out every so often to let Yorke's distantly twitching, wordless-murmur ambience burble for a moment sabotages the momentum. And as much promise as that skittering, icy beat holds, it sounds way too ghostly and mournful to back up a verse featuring namedrops of "The Gong Show" and Ernest Goes to Camp.
Jarel's two contributions make a lot more sense, since they capture the lyrics' menacing/absurd split personality in their own unique language. Given the advanced age of the Yorke remix, the Jarel/Sitek teamup is the blockbuster draw on this EP, and it doesn't disappoint. They pull a neat trick of turning Dilla's lifted keyboard melodies inside out and echoing it loosely with a burbling sound somewhere between highlife guitars and late-60s analog electronics, throwing in some truncated blasts of halfway-Afrobeat brass that eventually spill out into an invigorating horn outro. But it's Jarel's other contribution that steals the show: the Dr. Who Dat? mix is boom-bap that breathes through deep, thrumming digital bass, riding on zone-out synths and hi-hats that melt and freeze into crystalline sonics. He's done something better than distracting listeners from how great the original version is-- he's provided a good reason to speculate what DOOM might sound like over more beats like this.


On her debut, the Norwegian pop phenom offers a patina of fresh-faced authenticity and not much else.

Sucker Punch

Two years since she first arrived, it is difficult not to feel cynical about Sigrid, much as her fresh-faced image resists it. Her first single, “Don’t Kill My Vibe,” was released in February 2017, and established her as a pop iconoclast: the young woman who (at least according to her oft-told story) left a session with patronizing older male writers to write her own song about how out of touch they were. Her vibe, going by her first single, was a mix of earthiness—the rasped vocals shown off in the relatively naked verses—and machine-honed Scandinavian pop bombast. Since then, it has not been killed so much as flogged by a stream of Spotify bait cut from the same cloth: Island have thrown so many singles at the wall that three from last year aren’t even on Sucker Punch.
Hers is one of the most assiduous campaigns in contemporary pop, and yet everything about the PR push insists that Sigrid is not like the other pop stars. She doesn’t wear make-up. She doesn’t do features. She—let me check the notes—got her favorite T-shirt free from a Dutch airline, and she just wants to be free to be herself. In this sense, the 22-year-old Norwegian is exactly like the other pop stars, selling a version of authenticity that is just as constructed as a 63-foot inflatable snake or a dude wearing a giant marshmallow head. It’s “realness” as a shortcut to relatability, a two-dimensional affect that her slick debut album does little to flesh out.
Sigrid includes two songs on Sucker Punch that directly address the music industry’s attempts to manipulate her. Alongside “Don’t Kill My Vibe,” which sets the album’s tone of synth-battalion sweetness, there is “Business Dinners,” its slightest and most appealing song. It's a faded tropical postcard decorated with geometric Memphis Group squiggles; SOPHIE kicking back and sipping a piña colada. Lilting and off-kilter, it extracts the essence of Sigrid’s message as if by IV drip: The industry wants her to be “sweeter, better, angel,” “pictures, numbers, figures/Yeah, deeper, smarter,” an astute summary of the contradictions facing young female artists that she kisses off impeccably. “Standing on the shoreline/I just wanna swim and float,” she sings idly, and for a second you’re there with her, watching her long brown hair ripple in the waves. Then those fateful words re-emerge: “And I’m just trying to be me.”
If Sucker Punch contained more songs this endearingly weird and casually incisive, there would be a case for Sigrid’s individuality. “Strangers” improves on the “Don’t Kill My Vibe” template, using tiny percussive snags and an icy synth glow in the verses to create an air of genuine desolation. Then it ramps up, via a smartly deployed EDM riser, into a belting chorus that inverts everything that came before: the feverish synth arpeggiations packed tight, her optimism about her poetic attraction to a stranger flipped to cold, hard realism (“We’re falling head over heels for something that ain’t real”). Nearly every other song repeats the formula less effectively, save the piano ballads, which feel more like “Writer in the Dark About How to Write ‘Writer in the Dark.’”
“Strangers” is the best bit of writing amid some underdeveloped concepts: “Basic”—as in, “I wanna be basic/‘Cause you make me so complicated”—is shameless start-from-the-hashtag songwriting that really does sound focus-grouped by old men. “Sucker Punch” attempts to set a scene—a hallway rendezvous, coffee by the stairs, matching red hoodies—which it quickly forgets as it heaves into a triumphant major-key chorus eerily reminiscent of Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten.” Equally chipper is “Mine Right Now,” which sounds, of all things, like Billy Ocean’s “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going.” “Don’t Feel Like Crying” and “Sight of You” start with the kind of jaunty, slashing string sections that introduce Eurovision competitors.
There is potential in Sigrid’s optimistic sound. “Don’t Feel Like Crying” is almost obscenely chipper: If it wasn’t for the odd swear word, it could easily pass for Kidz Bop. But its brightness is blinding, almost painful, suggesting the sheer effort required to avoid wallowing post-breakup. To Sigrid and her cowriters’ credit, Sucker Punch remains dedicated to this primary-color production scheme, which dazzles in contrast to contemporary pop's nihilistic grey. But its formulaic songs lack the free-spirited personality that telegraphed her early promise. The story of a young female songwriter  pushing back against the sexist songwriters on her major label and modern pop’s oppressive beauty standards is an impressive one. The cautious Sucker Punch could do with more of that insurrectionist spirit.


The debut LP from Mountain Man's Amelia Meath and Megafaun's Nick Sanborn fills an obvious void. The Durham, NC duo’s fusion of quirky folk and quirky electro-pop would have otherwise been inevitably and awkwardly willed into existence, which is a good starting point for Sylvan Esso—but it’s also their endgame as well.

Sylvan Esso

There are bands that arrive fully formed with a fresh sound satisfying a need listeners didn’t even know they had—and then you have an act like Sylvan Esso, who fill an obvious void. The Durham, NC duo’s fusion of quirky folk and quirky electro-pop would have otherwise been inevitably and awkwardly willed into existence, since those are two of the most reliable, likeable, and syncable subgenres that fall under the “indie” umbrella. It’s a good starting point for Sylvan Esso, but it’s their endgame as well.
All the same, there is a guileless charm to the whole project and without it, there’s no way opener “Hey Mami” would be remotely tolerable. As Amelia Meath neatly manicures her syllables while singing, “Sooner or later/ The dudes at bodegas/ Will hold their lips and own this shit,” Rob Thomas’ Mona Lisa is strutting through Spanish Harlem. Maybe the urbane playfulness is a stilted attempt to compensate for Sylvan Esso’s background in antiquated and Appalachian music: Meath is a member of Vermont au naturel vocal group Mountain Man and part of Feist’s touring band, while Nick Sanborn plays bass in Megafaun, often contrasted with Bon Iver as the woolier, weirder offshoot of DeYarmond Edison. Fortunately, “Hey Mami” succeeds in being a folk song in an ethnomusical sense, a document of a real life situation. Meath’s looped vocals lend a languid, sun-weary, and slightly drunk quality, and it’s the ambient street noise rather than Sanborn’s protruding bass and skittering beats that evokes the scene they’re trying to relate. The same sense of place is crucial to “Coffee”, where Meath sings about the freedom of dancing as a participant, rather than an observer.
Most of Sylvan Esso’s points of comparison are contemporary and complimentary, but it’s easiest to draw a straight bloodline to Dirty Projectors' indie R&B O.G. “Stillness is the Move”, as Sylvan Esso’s sounds are thin and gawky, while dealing with small, tangible situations. Meath’s lyrics carry streak of homesickness and displacement, but it’s nothing existential or incomprehensible; judging from “Could I Be”, it’s just a matter of being on the road, because it’s there you’ll meet people like the carnivorous charmer who’s the subject of “Wolf”, saddled with obvious Zevon allusions and obvious metaphor (“But no birds or beasts does he eat/ he only wants the tenderest meat”). You can subsequently hear the chorus of “H.S.K.T.” (“Head, shoulders, knees and toes”) as a calming inventory to stay in the present moment while surrounded by the constant chatter of people, beeping cellphones, and televisions.
Unlike most of their sleeker, sizeable peers, Sylvan Esso is by and for portable electronic devices. Sanborn’s beats are a collection of “sound effects” rather than cohesive production or ambience—buzzing bazz, vacuums of synths, and the rest sounding like a shareware version of TNGHT. If Sylvan Esso sounds like rudimentary remixes of what could otherwise be casual and agreeable Mountain Man or Feist songs, well, that’s exactly how Sylvan Esso got started—Meath asked Sanborn, working under the rustic electro alias Made of Oak, to reconfigure Mountain Man’s “Play it Right” (included as the penultimate track here) and it grew into a full-fledged partnership.
While it’s easy to view Sylvan Esso as longtime side musicians taking the lead, there’s a disappointing retreat towards inoffensive lap-pop after “Hey Mami” and “Dreamy Bruises” boldly announce their intentions. Once you get a grasp of what it is Sylvan Esso do, Sanborn’s production somehow manages to be both repetitive and unfocused, while Meath’s chants start to blend into an indistinct schoolyard chatter, percussive sibilance over melody; “Hey Mami” is by a large margin the most grating song here, and it’s the one that seems to stick. Sylvan Esso may represent a declaration of freedom and artistic renewal, but it doesn’t necessarily result in memorable songs.
Still, like raw milk, I can’t shake that the lack of homogenization, the small-batch “organic” presentation of Sylvan Esso, is the main draw. Sure, bands like Hundred Waters and tUnE-yArDs emulsify indigenous music into coherent and unique artistic statements—electronic pop just as suitable for Coachella as it is for Coffee Bean—but their evolutions don't serve as a narrative, a statement about an audience writ large: namely, that R&B, pure pop, and such should be considered a kind of folk music for people who’ve grown up in the 21st century, and hey, isn’t it great that can exist side-by-side?  In that sense, Sylvan Esso is feel-good music on all fronts, and when it comes time to throw on something at a summer gathering that’ll make people feel slightly hipper than they were when they arrived, Sylvan Esso will be a go-to. But it’ll still feel like I’m living in a beer commercial, someone else's idea of an inclusive, hip summer day.


In his final years, Chuck Berry endeavored to make another record worthy of his rock’n’roll legacy. The resulting Chuck is a collection of new songs and covers that meditate on love and mortality.

Chuck

With each year that passed after 1980, it seemed more and more likely that Chuck Berry had moved into the “strictly live performances” phase of his career. He stopped making records after 1979’s Rock It—an album where prototypical Berry songwriting is marred by dated late ’70s production like tinny drums and cornball keyboards. From then on, he performed countless one-nighters with a different backing band in every town. He earned a reputation for being a prickly, demanding performer, and that portrait was amplified by his openly hostile interactions with Keith Richards and Eric Clapton in the 1986 documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. But while Chuck seemed like a tough guy to get along with, that film was also a testament to something else—he had tons of classics under his belt, and decades after they initially made impact, those songs remained vital.
In his final years, though, Chuck had unfinished business. He kept writing, and as he revealed a few years ago, he felt that he could still add something important to his discography. “I want to do something that I know will last after I leave,” he said in 2010. “I want to do another ‘Johnny B. Goode,’” or “something as powerful as ‘[My] Ding-A-Ling.’” So, on his 90th birthday last October, he announced his attempt at another career-defining work: Chuck, a 35-minute album with new songs and covers of old standards. He recorded the album with members of his family (all professional musicians in their own right) and a few marquee players. Tom Morello, Nathaniel Rateliff, and Gary Clark, Jr. all back up Berry on Chuck—each students of his work in their way, folding into his aesthetic fairly seamlessly. Chuck died five months later, making it his final recorded work and his last chance at creating a Chuck Berry classic.
The heartless truth is that, overall, Chuck is not as good as the early hits. That’s an impossibly tall order. Forgetting the untouchable “Johnny B. Goode” (deemed important enough to launch into space) and “Maybellene,” the guy released classics at a clip—“Nadine,” “You Never Can Tell,” “School Days,” “Back in the U.S.A.,” and tons of others. He wasn’t reinventing the wheel every time, but the hits kept coming, so he didn’t really need to.
The Chuck Berry template rears its head, for better and worse, throughout Chuck. “Big Boys” is the man at his best—an extremely familiar guitar solo intro that leads into a verse about working up the courage to dance with a crush. It’s a careening rock’n’roll song, vintage in its structure but lovably boisterous in its delivery. Chuck’s fully in his lane here—singing about falling in love and discovering rock’n’roll’s life-giving power when he was just “a little bitty boy.” During his prolific hitmaking stretch of the 1950s, when Berry was a 30-something high school dropout, he wrote extensively and expertly about teenage bliss. At the end of his life, he still knew exactly how to encapsulate the feeling of meeting someone special and having your life change at the perfect party.
The weakest links of Chuck don’t add anything new to his catalog. “Lady B. Goode”—his fourth (!) sequel to “Johnny B. Goode”—is predictable enough. The newest installment of the Johnny saga sounds a lot like “Johnny B. Goode,” only the lyrics are different and the pace drags a little more. “Jamaica Moon,” an updated version of his 1956 single “Havana Moon,” does not need Chuck’s newfound island patois: “Me still alone, me sip on the rum.” By recycling the old stuff, the new versions also highlight how Chuck’s crisp production quality can’t top the analog warmth of his earliest records.
When he announced Chuck, Berry released a short statement dedicating the album to his wife of 68 years, Themetta. “My darlin’ I’m growing old!” it read. “I’ve worked on this record for a long time. Now I can hang up my shoes!” Ultimately, the best and most vulnerable moments of the album are meditations on love and mortality. He sings about how “life can pass so fast away” on “Darlin’”—a heartfelt duet with his daughter Ingrid Berry-Clay. His voice slinks on a satisfying blues rendition of the 1938 standard “You Go to My Head” (which, coincidentally, also just got covered by Bob Dylan). But it’s on his live recording of “3/4 Time (Enchiladas)” where the wild-eyed, duck-walking raconteur crops up. He sings excitedly to the crowd that, despite his age and his health, he stays up all night writing songs. “I love what I’m doin’,” he shout-sings. “I hope it don't end too soon!” And that’s the best thing about Chuck—a portrait of an icon who refused to stop.


My wishlist of albums from artists who have yet to record full-lengths is as follows: Superpitcher, Junior\n\ Boys, Vitalic ...

Fabric 13

My wishlist of albums from artists who have yet to record full-lengths is as follows: Superpitcher, Junior Boys, Vitalic and, most of all, Michael Mayer. Whenever a new Mayer project is announced, it serves as a reminder of how few of his productions have been released. Yet whenever I hear these projects-- whether they be remixes, another release on his peerless tech-house label, Kompakt, or his ground-shifting mixes-- I'm reminded how thankful I am that he's at least out there doing what he does.
The latest work from Mayer is his contribution to one of London club/label Fabric's mix series. Fabric's label division has been spoiling us recently with outstanding contributions from Swayzak (Fabric 11) and Jacques Lu Cont (Fabrclive.9), among others, but this is arguably the strongest release in its history. Incredibly, it also challenges 2000's Immer as the best release in Mayer's catalog, effortlessly drawing from his own Kompakt pool as well as eight other labels, including Playhouse, Plong, and Volt.
Like most of Fabric's releases, Mayer's record is made with the dancefloor in mind so it's more ferocious than Immer, but like that dissection of the blissed-out end of German microhouse, it retains a Big Picture overview. In the past, Mayer's mixes have often seemed to be an attempt at taking a definitive snapshot of a particular sound from Neuhouse's mission statement, from the effortlessly blended, almost soothing and silken Immer to the schaffelfieber of Mayer's recent Peel Session (which is available only on mp3, not that we endorse that sort of thing, etc.) to the collection of Kompakt's more banging 12\xA5\xA5 sounds on Speciher. Instead, Fabric 13 is a more eclectic set, blending the differences between the seductive warmth and melody-- and increasingly pop and nu-glam-- sounds of Kompakt and adding underlying tones of menace and melancholy.
Connecting the dots between elements of not only his own label but of German tech-house as a whole, Mayer offers a panoramic view of the scene. He even steps overground on a couple of occasions, utilizing both Jackson's Midnight Fuck remix of "Run into Flowers" by French nu-shoegazers and Pitchfork faves M83 and a remix of Westban's German hit "Oldschool, Baby". With vocals by Nena (of "99 Luftballoons" fame), who wields her retro charm as a weapon, "Oldschool, Baby" flits between quoting small elements of Italo-piano and acid house and 80s electro, drawing on the charms of the past without ever rooting itself in one place and time. "We are the moment/ Here to last," Nena claims on a track that even outdoes the set's other great pop moments, the pair of mixes of Heiko Voss' contagious "I Think About You" that bookend the mix. (Voss' oftentimes partner Thomas Schaeben appears twice, including a collaboration with Geiger and Schad Privat called "Really Real", a swoon song whose superfluous title fits its overflowing sound.)
Elsewhere, the always thrilling Superpitcher is represented by his Total 5 glam-shuffle track "Mushroom", and a newer Mayer favorite, Richard Davis, is tossed into the mix a couple of times-- most memorably on "Bring Me Closer", a nightmare filled with haunting skips and jumps, baroque strings that seem to move in multiple directions at once, and an uneasy central pulse.
The central pulse on Fabric 13, Villalobos' "Easy Lee", is more of a solemn, battered lub. One of the highlights of his Alcachofa album, the Chilean ex-pat's woozy, weak vocodered voice sounds even more ominous and mournful among the near-gothic tones of Mayer's mix. Villalobos' work is a fitting foundation for this record, a mix of surging, sharp dance rhythms which never build to any of the kind of overpowering peaks that could keep home listeners and/or tech-house novices at arm's length.
Every so often Mayer will get the odd criticism that he's simply an excellent ringleader and idea man, sort of the Dave Eggers of tech-house. Well, that line of talk is frankly wrong. He expertly scouts and attracts the talent, sequences the tracks, and sets the tone for the entire sound-- despite his own productions remaining sadly few and far between. Michael Mayer's two mixes and his Peel Session mark him as one of the year's most vital artists, a sort of weatherman who determines which way the wind blows in Berlin, Cologne, and any place where ears are cocked.


The meeting of unashamed, celebratory club music and rock star fandom is what gives Primal Scream's 1991 album Screamadelica its particular mood, half strutting with confidence, half yearning for transcendence. It’s a full-length manifesto not just for the brotherhood of clubbing but for the syncretic approach to rock Primal Scream were exploring.

Screamadelica

A trumpet riff; a louche, echoey, funk groove scoured by trails of guitar; a snatch of dialogue from The Wild Angels – "we wanna be free – to do what we wanna do". In February 1990, Screamadelica’s lead single "Loaded" made for an odd UK hit. Its sample soup might have put you in mind of tracks by DJs like Coldcut, but more laid back, and with the magpie wit replaced by studied cool.
The vibe of "Loaded" was unusual enough. The identity of its makers was what really startled. Primal Scream had already jumped from sweet-toothed jangle-pop, which Bobby Gillespie’s reedy voice suited well, to scuzzy proto-grunge, which it really didn’t. Reviewers found the band’s second self-titled LP an awkward experience, which explains why a further lurch in direction on "Loaded" attracted as much mockery as delight. Great single, everyone agreed – but was it actually Primal Scream in anything but name?
"Loaded" had precedent – the warm, loping shuffle of the Stone Roses’ "Fools’ Gold" for one – but its status was set as much by what came after. Gillespie wasn’t the only indie bandleader to find himself a new groove, and the summer of 1990 was speckled with similar hits from the obscurest of sources: the Soup Dragons, the Beloved, the Farm. Like earlier psychedelic explosions, you might argue how much of this was down to the liberating effects of drugs and music on shy boys in bands, and how much was down to the more worldly urge to make some fast money and get on TV. The indie-dance bubble inflated, and a saucer-eyed version of "Strawberry Fields Forever" by unknown chancers Candy Flip probably marked the exact moment it burst. Months after that, the Primal Scream LP finally came out.
If welding "dance" and "rock" was all it achieved, its 18-month gestation would have hurt Screamadelica. The album might have been a mere appendix to a briefly promising scene. Fortunately, Screamadelica's power isn’t in an abstract clash of two different genres, but in the marriage of two very similar sensibilities.
One is Bobby Gillespie’s. Primal Scream’s output has sometimes been dismissed as "record collection rock", their versatility no more than a procession of learned poses – the Byrds, rave, krautrock, post-punk. But Gillespie’s approach is less bandwagon-jumping and more a kind of aesthetic cosplay, where his fannish intensity of identification works to overcome the limitations of technique. The comedown blues of "Damaged" is Screamadelica’s weakest song, but Gillespie’s conviction makes it essential to the record.
The other is producer Andy Weatherall’s. Weatherall, along with Terry Farley who remixed the "Come Together" single, was part of the Boy’s Own DJ and fanzine collective in the earliest days of London Acid House. Boy’s Own loved big, uplifting records, played any genre they fancied, and everything they did, in print or on record, was touched with a cheeky swagger. The euphoric splash of Italo house piano at the climax of "Don’t Fight It, Feel It", Screamadelica’s most floor-ready track, is a great Weatherall moment.
The meeting of these approaches – unashamed, celebratory club music and rock star fandom – is what gives Screamadelica its particular mood, half strutting with confidence, half yearning for transcendence. One result is that the record is often better when Bobby Gillespie is a presiding spirit rather than an actual singer. Compare album centrepiece "Come Together" with its single version, where Gillespie enacts a loved-up Ecstasy high in winsome style. The LP drops his vocals, reshapes the track around the gospel backing singers, and it becomes something titanic. It’s a full-length manifesto not just for the brotherhood of clubbing but for the syncretic approach to rock Primal Scream were exploring. "All those are just labels", thunders a sampled Reverend Jesse Jackson, "We know that music is music." If you want to know how joyful – and how corny – pop’s discovery of rave could feel in 1991, this is where to start.
Other high points use the frontman better. "Higher Than The Sun" casts Gillespie as an astral voyager in a post-rave take on Tim Buckley’s "Starsailor". He sounds as awed by its soundscape of hoots, harpsichords, ambient drift and trumpet blasts as the listener. 13th Floor Elevators cover "Slip Inside This House" is just as questing, but more earthy and urgent, with a ragged-voiced Robert Young pushed beyond his limits by the groove.
Screamadelica is a limit-breaking exercise in general, exploring a central question: what is ‘a band’ in the remix age? One reason the LP remains a classic is that its answer to this is so bold and open-ended – ‘Primal Scream’ here is anything from a rock group having the time of their lives on "Movin’ On Up", to a vaporous but definite presence on "Higher Than The Sun (A Dub Symphony In Two Parts)". The scoffers’ question about "Loaded" – is this really Primal Scream? – is firmly answered: it is if it feels that way.
The fact that Primal Scream, and others, quickly retreated from this answer doesn’t make it less true. But even by 1992’s Dixie-Narco EP – included on this reissue - the band were downplaying the clubbing influence in favour of something more rootsy, recording new tracks in Memphis. Ultimately, the group’s own preference for being a rock’n’roll touring unit – with associated debauchery – stopped them pushing harder on the doors Screamadelica unlocked.
The two bonus discs fall either side of the tightrope they were walking – a collection of mixes, and a document of the group’s 1992 touring set. The former, like most mix collections, isn’t meant for linear listening, but assorted nearly-there versions of "Loaded" show a great idea coming together and the 12" of "Higher Than The Sun" is a glorious re-immersion in the song’s sensory otherworld.
The live disc finds a ramshackle group admirably committed to showing their audience a great time, twisting Screamadelica’s grooves into more band-friendly shapes in the process. Some of them suffer – the segue from "Higher Than The Sun" into a clodhopping fragment of Sly Stone’s "Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey" is an excruciating flip from Gillespie’s finest impulses into his worst. But at best, like on the vocal version of "Come Together", the tracks wear their extra muscle well. And even if it closes down half of what made Screamadelica special – its reinvention of band as aesthetic – it pulls focus onto the other half. The record is in places ambitious, cosmic, showily wasted – but the thing it is most is a great party album. "Loaded", "Movin’ On Up", "Don’t Fight It, Feel It" are still immense dance-rock singles, and Screamadelica is one of alternative music’s great periodic rediscoveries of rhythm. Dance music threw open new wardrobes for British indie – and an inveterate dresser-up like Bobby Gillespie could, and did, take full advantage.


The English producer’s new album reflects his gift for meticulous construction, but it feels more akin to a well-curated playlist than a unified statement.

Vegyn: The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

Joseph Thornalley values his privacy. On the rare occasion that the London-born artist gives an interview, he keeps his cards close, only offering enough details to foster more curiosity. Thornalley, who records under the name Vegyn, doesn’t often perform live and mostly steers clear of social media, but has worked with megastars like Frank Ocean, Travis Scott, Kali Uchis, and Dean Blunt. His music doesn’t provide many intimate details either, but it does reflect his eclectic influences, ranging from dubby ambient to lush techno to toystore electro, as well as his deep love of hip-hop. Even if it isn’t explicitly personal, his music is always meticulously constructed and frequently gorgeous, the product of a songwriter’s approach to textural electronic production. Thornalley’s new album, The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions, is another ornate but shadowy collection in his discography. It sounds incredible, but ultimately doesn’t reveal much beyond his wide-ranging taste.
Born of Thornalley’s itinerant lifestyle as a label head and in-demand producer, The Road to Hell took shape in various studios, hotel rooms, and apartments around the world. He was hoping to break out of his usual production methods, challenging himself to write songs on piano and guitar, instruments he hasn’t yet mastered. Many of the Vegyn trademarks are present—cannily programmed drums, sparkling synths that sit in the mix like low-lying clouds—but Thornalley tames the genre-hopping just a touch, keeping his sounds contemporary but homing in on the yearning emotional core of ’00s R&B crooners like Ne-Yo and Toni Braxton. “Last Night I Dreamt I Was Alone” and “Halo Flip” apply a loose jungle framework to the emotional balladry of the aughts, while “Stress Test” sounds like Craig David circa Born to Do It studying at Lofi Girl’s desk. These tracks are impeccably assembled, and, in most cases, quite catchy if listened to on their own outside of the album. But as a whole, The Road to Hell doesn’t quite gel, feeling more akin to a well-curated, vibey playlist than a unified statement.
It’s when Thornalley really lets loose that the record excels. The Road to Hell’s trip-hop flirtations are among its strongest cuts; “Turn Me Inside,” a rainy-day combination of glowing Rhodes, stuttering percussion, and Léa Sen’s smoky vocals, is a particular highlight. “The Path Less Travelled” is a blissful blast of big beat, sunburst synthesizers echoing into the distance like cathartic shouts from a mountaintop. Thornalley takes an especially strange left turn at the album’s midpoint and drops “Makeshift Tourniquet,” a festival-ready house heater. It’s the most propulsive song on the album, building tension through shuffling drums and pads that wobble in and out of tune like heat lines off a stretch of desert highway. When the song explodes into a flurry of spacey sequences in the final minute, it marks one of The Road to Hell’s most thrilling moments, but it doesn’t signify a distinct change in direction. Like most everything on the record, it jams and then we move on.
The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions is Thornalley’s most crowd-pleasing project to date, even if it isn’t his most cohesive. These songs are bigger and more immediate than much of his previous work, and an excellent display of the range in which he operates. But imagine if he were to explore the adventurous potential of a song like “In the Front,” which starts as a glitchy Boards of Canada tribute before morphing into an aching, string-laden swirl with trap drums straight out of James Blake’s playbook. Perhaps an entire project of shapeshifting arrangements would be too personal for comfort, a too-clear window into Thornalley’s mind. For now, he seems content to keep us at arm’s length, his exquisite music a shield against the vulnerability of really being seen.


On his first album as Deepchord in four years, Rod Modell continues to refine his bustling, urban, singular take on dub techno.

Functional Designs

Deepchord’s Rod Modell is a singular presence in a genre that makes a virtue of anonymity. Starting with Basic Channel in the 1990s, dub-techno artists have often attempted to remove themselves from their work, recording under cryptic aliases and fueling speculation about their identities. Modell, meanwhile, poses in photos with a tobacco pipe and isn’t afraid to present himself as an individual with a fierce vision, positioning his music as an alternative to the “Berghain sound” of techno that he finds spiritually damaging. Appropriately, his music reflects a more human presence than most dub techno: Taking place in a dense cityscape instead of an endless void, it’s more interested in everyday life than cosmic awe. His music is pristinely sound-designed instead of lo-fi, urban instead of elemental, crafted by hand instead of shaped by water and wind.
Functional Designs is Modell’s first release as Deepchord since 2018’s Immersions, and the brief ambient opener “Amber” immediately re-introduces the familiar hallmarks of his sound: hi-def production, dense layers of phasers and static, bustling field recordings of people and machines, voluptuous chords that simmer low in the mix and give the project its name. When Modell brings in the kick drum on “Darkness Falls,” it’s like stepping onto a subway train, or being sucked into a vortex. Modell often titles his records in the plural—20 Electrostatic Soundfields, Immersions, Auratones—as if to suggest we’re meant to take them as collections of tracks rather than front-to-back statements. Yet the sense of forward motion Modell’s music generates is so powerful we still get the sense of each track hurtling breathlessly into the next, racing headlong to the finish line.
Though Modell’s recent sound stands alone in dub techno, he’s been committed to it at least since 2010’s Liumin, released in collaboration with Stephen Hitchell as Deepchord Presents Echospace, which wove field recordings from Tokyo into one of electronic music’s most vivid evocations of metropolitan sprawl. Functional Designs is of a piece with Liumin, Auratones, Immersions, and most of Modell’s other recent work, and the record’s most surprising moments come less from Modell finding bold new contexts for his style than new sounds that work well within it. A vocoder casts vivid splashes of color on “CloudSat,” and a percussive effect on “Transit Systems” offers a ghostly hint of piano. “Strangers,” the prickliest track here, builds tension with a creepy tolling bell and a leaden hi-hat that lends a real sense of weight to this vaporous music.
Functional Designs finds Modell playing firmly to his strengths, but if you were looking forward to the producer expanding and re-thinking his sound on his return to the Deepchord project rather than continuing to do what he does best, you might come away from Functional Designs a bit underwhelmed. It’d be tricky to identify which Deepchord album many of these tracks are on from a blind test, and though “Strangers” nicely sours the album’s vibe in the middle, there’s no pervasive shift in mood, sound, or approach to give Functional Designs much of a distinct personality within his catalog. Modell’s vision for dub techno is one of the most striking since its inception, but he seems more content to keep fine-tuning it rather than use it to open new dimensions.


The German DJ offers a spellbinding summary of her sound with this compilation of slow, ominous machine grooves. It’s a cross-section of her record collection, but also a map of a community.

Selectors 005

Dekmantel’s Selectors series is an unusual proposition. Though a DJ helms each installment, they are compilations, not mixes. The theme varies according to the selector. Germany’s Motor City Drum Ensemble summed up his soulful predilections by licensing a bunch of decades-old, out-of-print house music; the Berghain resident Marcel Dettmann highlighted his industrial roots with tracks from Front 242, Ministry, and Clan of Xymox. The franchise is a bit like Back to Mine or Late Night Tales, just for people that drop their monthly grocery budget on rare 12"s on Discogs.
The concept is an outgrowth of the recent trend for “selector”-style DJs, said to dig deeper than their merely crowd-pleasing peers. (Dekmantel, a Dutch label and events outfit, also has a spin-off festival, Selectors, dedicated to the same.) On its face, unearthing seldom-heard records might seem to be a basic part of the DJ’s job; that it has been deemed worthy of notice says something about the state of dance music, where the quality of surprise has been downgraded to a nice-to-have rather than an essential component.
But if anyone deserves the tag, the German DJ Lena Willikens does. Her style of playing—slow and ominous, given to grinding machine grooves and clammy atmospheres—is unusually distinctive. She honed her chops as a resident at Düsseldorf’s famously eclectic Salon des Amateurs, a club known for its wide-open musical policy, and her sets are full of curveballs and head-scratchers, the sorts of tracks Shazam can’t begin to puzzle out.
That Willikens has released very little original music under her name makes Selectors 005 feel even more worthwhile as a rare opportunity to hear the world through her ears. At Barcelona’s Sónar last year, she turned a daytime, outdoor slot usually reserved for feel-good grooves into a dungeon acid séance, meting out bone-chilling EBM that stubbornly refused to break a sweat. Here, too, the tempos tend toward cryogenic. Minor keys predominate, and textures are resolutely analog, favoring unvarnished drum machines, gravelly synths, and an omnipresent lo-fi sheen.
Willikens’ repertoire is heavy on material given to her by friends and peers, and that’s largely what she’s chosen to run with here, filling half of Selectors 005 with exclusive tracks. The grimly droning “Sepses” is by a German duo, Garland, so unknown that as of this writing, they don’t even have their own Discogs entry. Willikens first encountered the Romanian producer Borusiade, whose paranoid coldwave fugue “Night Drive (An Exercise in Indulgence)” is a standout, through one of her DJ sets on SoundCloud. It’s striking how many tracks come with a personal story attached—a chance encounter and a shared musical affinity that led to a friendship. You get the sense that Willikens’ sets aren’t just a representation of her own tastes. They are a manifestation of a shared aesthetic, a map of a community.
When it comes to the previously released music here, none of her rarities are all that rare; many of them could be had for a few dollars, assuming you knew to look for them in the first place. “Morning Star (Dubmix)” is a 1996 track by Sandoz, a dubby alter ego of Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk, sourced from a dime-a-dozen electronic comp from the period. Vromb’s “Amalgame” is a sepulchral, slow-motion techno cut from 2001 that she discovered lurking in the Cologne record shop A-Musik’s dusty CD racks. Sysex’s excellent “Deep Space” has been hiding in plain sight for the past 24 years, tucked away on a long-forgotten CD anthology on Richie Hawtin’s Plus 8 label. What’s so gratifying about all these is the way that, in context, they begin to flesh out the outlines of an idea. Heard on its own, “Amalgame” might not sound like much, just a minimalist variant on the kind of thing Pan Sonic did better. But here, it becomes part of a dialogue.
That idea is best illustrated by Varoshi Fame’s “Voice of Command (Chekov Re-Edit),” the compilation’s absolute highlight. The song originally comes from a 1987 cassette on a Toronto industrial label; the pounding, hypnotic remix comes from Leeds’ Chekov, a rising producer who introduced himself to Willikens at one of her gigs and asked if he could send her his music. His instincts were on point: Piercing and percussive, laced with laser zaps and sinister shouts, his edit navigates past and present in a way that’s perfectly in keeping with Willikens’ tarnished psychedelia. And without her curatorial hand, we might never have heard it at all.


A dizzying mix of Baroque, religious, mid-century, and contemporary classical music, this soundtrack captures its film’s tempestuous relationship with power and feelings.

Various Artists: The Favourite (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

The Favourite is a frenzied comedy of manic twists and turns, at least in short form—that is, its trailer. Soundtracked by Handel, Vivaldi, and, ultimately, dissonance, Emma Stone falls in mud, Olivia Colman faints, and Joe Alwyn dances some 18th-century variant on flossing. It seems fast, consequential, and mad, a feeling amplified by those melting strings and rumbling piano notes, courtesy of French musique concrète pioneer Luc Ferrari.
Stretched out to its full length, the insanity of The Favourite reveals itself languidly. The third English-language film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite tells the story of Great Britain’s Queen Anne (played by Olivia Colman) and the power struggle qua love triangle that develops with the regal Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and the wayward cousin Abigail Masham (Emma Stone). The soundtrack, likewise, disorients carefully. Across 78 minutes, it presents a thrillingly bizarre mix of baroque and contemporary classical music, sprawling from Johann Sebastian Bach and his son Wilhelm Friedemann to British experimental composer Anna Meredith and even Elton John. The ways that these incongruent parts interact define the soundtrack, creating a chimera that is neither wholly new nor dated, just as Lanthimos teases the concept of historical drama with a film as serious as it is campy and loose.
After seven sprightly minutes of concertos, the soundtrack slams to an intriguing halt with the start of Ferrari’s “Didascalies.” It begins with the quietest of violas, so low that the notes are hardly discernible for the first half. In his own analysis, Ferrari wrote that he incorporated son mémorisé (“Memorized Sound”) into “Didascalies,” a technique that involved the late composer recreating sounds from his natural environment by memory. Heard here, the piece requires the listener to attempt to remember the preceding pomp amid Ferrari’s lurking murmur. By the end of “Didascalies,” the viola, which once kept pace like a metronome, saws across the music in atonal slashes. Belgian pianist Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven hammers hard, rendering chaos in the place of what was once quietude. “Didascalies” underscores the idea that even the most solemn scenarios can devolve dramatically, a lesson implicit in The Favourite. Following this out-of-body episode, the first movement of a lively Vivaldi concerto snaps us back to royal business.
The album reaches its most curious stretch in the middle, with 19 minutes of organ music. The passage toys with seriousness and levity, placing church music alongside a J.S. Bach pastorale and fantasia. A late movement of Olivier Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur feels rigid yet formless, as if the organist is playing one-handed. The Bach pieces, in contrast, are lively. British organist Peter Hurford’s performance of the fantasia was even issued as a single, a fitting representation of The Favourite at large—a bit anachronistic, amusing, and idiosyncratic.
A quiet movement from Meredith’s Songs for the M8 leads the listener toward a feeling of dread after a period of loopiness. The soundtrack pursues that mournful tone, its most somber moment arriving with Schubert’s final piano sonata, finished two months before he died. It’s performed, no less, by Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel, considered the preeminent Schubert interpreter for his balance of heavy emotion and melodrama-free restraint. Beautiful, patient, and haunted, it nearly lifts the listener out of the soundtrack’s dizzying atmosphere altogether and into its own headspace. For the sonata’s 11 minutes, the world is bleak and important. But then it’s over.
And just like that, The Favourite’s soundtrack ends with Elton John’s harpsichord pleasantry, “Skyline Pigeon,” the wink following a deep sigh. We turn instantly from a composer’s final writings to a bit of fun, with a pigeon flapping its wings. This is the same trick Lanthimos plays again and again with the film. Enacted by flawed humans, power and feelings are not sacred or pure, the movie submits. The Favourite’s soundtrack, in turn, is a fussy but amusing collection, refusing to commit to a mood more distinct than emotional unrest.


Side B is less a collection of b-sides than it is a continuation of last year's full-length smash, heart-swelling and heart-draining pop that exists in worlds just before or after love.

E•MO•TION Side B

Carly Rae Jepsen doesn’t sing love songs, exactly. A friend pointed out that Carly lives in the intervals—when love is just out of frame, acting as a gravitational force. Her songs are preludes and codas. “First Time,” the opening track of E•MO•TION* Side B*—a collection of outtakes released a year after last year’s E•MO•TION—is a coda and prelude at the same time. It begins as a cassette-recording of its own chorus, a distorted and decayed memory of itself, which is then rewound to the start of its verse before it drops in with a sudden, severe clarity. The song is about a messy breakup that she tries to guide back to the more intelligible beginnings of a relationship. She sings, “When my heart breaks it always feels like the first time,” and, “Through all the heartbreak we’ll make it feel like the first time.” This is how time works in Jepsen’s songs. Every emotion contains all previous instances of its feeling and is experienced as a collapsed whole. The songs on E•MO•TION* Side B* are pop songs, gorgeous and direct, but they are also extremely recursive spaces, blushing compressions of time, small infinities of heartbreak.
These songs, sometimes more so than the album for which they were recorded, fold in synthetic textures from ’80s pop and give them a modern finish, producing music that feels incongruent with both of its intended time periods. The songs can derive meaning and power from their associative design; in “Higher,” for instance, synths provide both the song’s texture and rhythm, and guitars glimmer as if they were stars embedded in the track; it produces the crisp, fussed architecture of a Scritti Politti song and fills it with new feelings. It’s the most transparent “love” song released from Jepsen’s sessions for E•MO•TION (for which apparently 250 songs were written) in that it takes place in the context of an actual relationship. Elsewhere she is repelled or attracted by love, either by its presence or absence. “We should know better, this can’t last forever/Kiss me one more time,” she sings in “The One,” a song in which she actively resists the boundaries of a relationship but still finds herself slipping into its pull. There’s a shyness to the beat of “The One,” a kind of internal swerve as if it’s resisting the same designations and definitions as Jepsen. Form and function also align in “Cry,” a song animated by a synth bass that’s just muted enough to invert its usual effect, generating a feeling of weightlessness. Jepsen uses this environment to describe the cruel asymmetry of being in a relationship with someone who’s emotionally unavailable.
The songs on E•MO•TION* Side B* feel decidedly more like a continuation of E•MO•TION itself. Still, a few are included to reveal a more disordered process, a sense that Jepsen was working through as many forms and ideas as possible until she found the aesthetic for E•MO•TION. “Body Language,” co-written with Dev Hynes, builds to a chorus that feels like an unremarkable subplot of the verse. “Store” is fascinating, in that it sounds like different songs written at different times had inorganically fused together. The verse is carefully sung, a dream sequence from which the chorus is a violent waking. “I’m just going to the store,” Jepsen sings over synths that resemble individual belches of a saxophone, “You might not see me anymore.” Its greatest appeal lies perhaps in the conceit of the lyric, that Jepsen might casually break up with someone by walking to a nearby deli and dematerializing.
2015’s E•MO•TION has the design of a big pop record, but it found more critical success than commercial. “With pop I think the hidden article of faith is that music can take over public space, stamp itself on a moment,” Pitchfork contributor Tom Ewing wrote in 2011. “If a pop single can't do this, then what is it?” Like most pop music that’s only “pop” in an idiomatic sense, it tends to function as an unintended secret. Jepsen released E•MO•TION* Side B* in this spirit, a gift to the fiercely devoted if niche fanbase she’s amassed since the release of E•MO•TION. That the songs can sound enormous while maintaining this kind of person-to-person intimacy is Jepsen’s particular talent. On “Fever,” in the weird and unstable space just before a breakup, Jepsen describes stealing her boyfriend’s bicycle and then riding it back to his house, only to discover he’s not home. His absence causes a near silence in the song, where Jepsen's musical and emotional environment are vacuumed into the throb of a bass drum, a kind of vertigo and panic encoded in sound. “You want to break my heart/All right,” she sings, “I caught your fever/I’ll be feeling it forever.” In this fluctuating reality, the synths she sings over have a glow that’s both alien and familiar, like objects under a blacklight. It feels like the feeling.


On the first release on his new label Young Ethics, the Swedish producer steps outside his hazy comfort zone.

Galazy EP

DJ Seinfeld is something of an enigma: the accidental spokesperson for an internet micro-genre he largely disavowed, a producer whose silly moniker is at odds with the earnestness of his music. Galazy strips away some of the mystery. It is Jakobsson’s first release on his own record label, Young Ethics, an imprint whose name comes, he says, from “uncertain moments [that] stem from the maturity (or lack thereof) of the industry.” This quest for clarity seems to have trickled down into the music itself. Gone are the hazy textures of his 2017 full-length debut, Time Spent Away From U, and the tortured bassline exercises of last year’s Sakura EP. This is a newly focused Jakobsson, one in search of a sturdier sonic identity that might hold a better shot at standing the test of time.
Lead single “Electrian” is a dreamy opener; digital bird calls gradually swell into low-end catharsis. It’s perhaps the closest thing we get to the Seinfeld sound that drew listeners to him in the first place. The song taps into the introspective moods demonstrated by similarly atmospheric-minded producers like Lone, its long ambient tails propelled forward by breakbeats and the occasional well-placed cowbell.
“Uforia” and the title track seem to have been made with the Swedish producer’s last few years of DJing in mind. Where original productions he slipped into his recent entry in the vaunted DJ-Kicks mix series were pretty low-key, Jakobsson has no problem popping off here. “Uforia” aims to fill warehouses with its menacing techno percussion and off-kilter synth stabs, like a supercharged version of Radiohead’s “The Gloaming.”
On “Galazy,” Jakobsson resorts to one of the most widely sampled records of all time, Lyn Collins’ “Think (About It).” He eschews the ubiquitous “Yeah! Woo!” in favor of a secondary loop, but the song never transcends or even lives up to its iconic foundational element. By the midpoint, James Brown’s voice is a fly in the ointment, buried but ever audible amidst a tangle of Reese bass and chunky snares.
Jakobsson has demonstrated before that his grander vision lies beyond the realm of the dancefloor: The DJ-Kicks opener “I See U” combined field recordings with gratuitous amounts of reverb to set an otherworldly scene, with nary a beat in sight. Similarly, the most promising moment of the EP is “Mono Melo,” a slower track that sounds like an early Massive Attack demo, with its swung drums and brittle, digitally distorted synths. Gone are the days of cranked-up tape saturation deployed for the sake of an aesthetic; having helped define lo-fi house, DJ Seinfeld is reaching for something more.


Impersonator is Devon Welsh and Matthew Otto's second album as Majical Cloudz. Like their live shows, it is searingly, emotionally direct, extraordinarily sung, and hypnotically focused, made special by Welsh's sense of emotional urgency.

Impersonator

Imagine someone at your otherwise-mundane party has dropped ecstasy; he's the only one there who has done so. Flushed, sweaty, intense, he stares everyone directly in the eyes and says things like "I see this light coming from behind and growing to enormous size. This is magic." Ignoring everyone's obvious discomfort, he presses on mercilessly: "Hey mister," he asks, locking eyes with you. "Don't you want to be right here?"
Devon Welsh sings these lines on Impersonator, his second album with synth programmer Matthew Otto under the name Majical Cloudz. And this role-- the Jehovah's Witness ringing your doorbell at 7 a.m. to save your life, the AA member interrupting your lunch hour to explain how his fear of being loved led him to key your Volkswagen last April-- is the role that Welsh plays on Impersonator. In his searingly direct live shows, which have often ended with Welsh standing in the crowd, basking in the communal emotional wellspring he's summoned, and on record, Welsh burns through surrounding obstacles in order make you feel what he is feeling. Impersonator is a gorgeous record-- extraordinarily sung, hypnotically focused-- but it is Welsh's sense of emotional urgency that makes it special. No-one else is likely to pin your ear back in quite the same way this year.
The foundation of the music is synth pop, though Welsh and Otto use it to construct glacially paced, small pieces of music with almost no harmonic motion. Most songs are made of three or fewer elements: "Childhood's End" has a four-note keyboard melody, two bare notes of synth string, one droning "ahhh" note, and a heartbeat-pulse click track. The air around each element is as palpable-- and as important to the track-- as the elements themselves. On the title track, some voices, looped and babbling, are the only sounds accompanying Welsh, apart from a hushed burst of church organ. There is a natural, inexorable feel to the repetition of these sounds; like clear water quarreling over smooth stones, they're an impersonal constant that situates Welsh's painfully personal performance somewhere larger than himself.
The simplicity of the sound also mirrors the purity and directness of Welsh's language. Here's his idea of an icebreaker: "Hey man, sooner or later you'll be dead." "I wanna feel like somebody's darling," he sings on "Impersonator". Welsh's are the carefully chosen words of someone whose life depends on getting his point across, and his lyrics often read, on paper, like self-help: "I feel the mood to love myself and I know I'm trying," he says on "Mister". But to someone dangling by a thread, self-help clichés take on a terrible significance, and Welsh's voice conveys the desperation of someone who has been tasked with believing in the simplest things again.
Welsh has said that, although he gravitated naturally towards the frontman role of whatever band he was in, he was never trained to sing. Listening to his expertly modulated phrasing, his long-breathed lines, and his rich, even tone on Impersonator, it's kind of hard to believe. (For his part, Welsh attributes his natural vocal command to the fact that his father is actor Kenneth Welsh, best known for playing "Twin Peaks"' Windom Earle.) There is a hint of Depeche Mode's David Gahan in the plummy edges of his voice, but Gahan's camp and hauteur are burned away; Gahan used those tools to establish distance, and Welsh's aim is to close it. He is startlingly flexible, capable of dipping to Calvin Johnson-basso profundo lows, but without Johnson's training-wheels wobbles. He can ascend effortlessly into a bell-clear head-voice that recalls the George Michael of "One More Try". His velvety, heated vocal take on "Turns Turns Turns", while not a pyrotechnic performance, remains one of the most nakedly beautiful pieces of singing I've heard this year, in any genre.
You can hear the idiosyncrasies of Welsh's self-training poke out of some of the album's odder edges. On "Childhood's End", the word "come," sung in an ascending melody, separates out so that it sounds like "come home." On the same song, he turns the word "me" into three words, each with a different vowel. These quirks work as part of Welsh's larger forceful disarmament strategy: “People that have written reviews of our shows have commented that, ‘Oh, he seemed nervous or he seemed uncomfortable on stage' … I tend to take that as a compliment," he said. "I never want to be the kind of performer that seems completely calm and collected on stage; I would rather … [be real] about the idea that when you get on stage it always feels new.” On "I Do Sing for You", Welsh reaches out to soothe a member of his own embarrassed audience: "You would laugh, but I'm on stage for you/ I do sing for you/ Of course I do, and I love to." There is very little you can do in the face of such an onslaught of loving kindness, so you surrender. Impersonator gently twists your arm like this, song-by-song and note-by-note, and it is as discomfiting as it is transcendent.