Written during a period of grief, Jhené Aiko’s 22-track LP turns her methods of survival—enlightenment, drugs, music itself—into an epic concept album. Some of Aiko’s most honest writing occurs here.

Trip

Grief is unlike any other life experience. It is the process of feeling the spectrum of human emotion all at once: unbearable sorrow combined with profound joy to have known this person, immense love coupled with blinding anger that they’re gone. The weight of grief threatened to buckle Jhené Aiko after she lost her brother Miyagi in 2012, but she turned to music for respite. She turned to spiritual enlightenment, and she turned to drugs. Trip is the culmination of it all, hazily floating over a hefty 22 tracks.
As a concept album, Trip aims to translate the hallucinogenic highs of weed, LSD, and shrooms into sound. Befitting its length, these are highs that last for hours on end. The airiness of Aiko’s voice blends well into the spare, psychedelia-inspired productions courtesy of Dot Da Genius, Fisticuffs, and Amaire Johnson among others. Where her peers often drift towards dense electronica or hip-hop to inform their sounds and give them commercial appeal, Aiko keeps this music light and ambient, a space where she’s at her best. It’s all part of a larger multimedia project comprising an emotional short film, the album, and a forthcoming book of poetry. Aiko has completely opened herself up for this work, bravely mourning in public and exposing all the ways she tried and failed to do so in private. With that, Trip exists for its own sake and on its own terms; it’s a respectable undertaking, even if 90 minutes seems daunting. Trip is more committed to its narrative of self-discovery than churning out a hit, but there are a few potentials.
While the skating rink groove of “OLLA (Only Lovers Left Alive)” is the album’s most ostensibly pop-facing moment, the Swae Lee-assisted “Sativa” is the immediate standout. Lyrically, it’s a sexy party hookup anthem (“Why you make it so complicated?/Off the drink, we concentratin’/I know you won’t leave me hangin’,” goes the hook), but it ends up feeling like that moment when you’re too faded to actually complete the mission. It is bittersweet euphoria. These two tracks are some of the more dynamic within an album that can feel a bit one-note at times. It generally does well as chilled-out background music, but it’s also worthwhile as a focused listen, as some of Aiko’s most honest writing shows up here.
On “Jukai,” Aiko grapples with the concept of suicide, inspired by Japan’s Aokigahara forest. With “Nobody” and “Overstimulated,” she battles her demons of addiction. “Pop one, pop two, pop three, four pills/These things tell me how I should feel,” she sings on “Nobody,” convinced she can (or has to) handle her problems alone. “Overstimulated” captures the dizzying effects of stimulants like cocaine and Adderall, but there’s a seductive element in her lyrics that makes the high sound as fleeting as a noncommittal lover. Ultimately, all of this is built around the grief. Aiko’s constant search “for a brother’s love in every single man” ties into her hope that if she can just “get high enough,” she can reach him.
Towards the back end, the gloom begins to subside. Optimism sets in as the clarity from the trip materializes. “Sing to Me,” featuring Aiko’s daughter Namiko Love, is one of the album’s shining moments. The adoration the two share for each other is palpable as they sing back and forth—“mommy sing to me” and “Nami sing to me ”—over piano chords that, coincidentally, bring to mind Big Sean’s “Memories.” It’s sentimental and effective; there’s nothing like the love of a child to clarify blurry visions of the future. “Frequency” is a hopeful prayer for liberation: “Free my city, freed my seed/Bless my situation, give me freedom/Bless the generation, give them mercy.” And on the rose-colored “Ascension,” Brandy’s feathery voice is a perfect complement to Aiko's. The production seems to twinkle as Aiko, “on her way to heaven,” finally makes her peace.
Trip works because it isn't just about self-medicating or journeying through a grief-ridden mind. Rather, it’s about all the places we go to escape from reality and ourselves. It's about the way vices can be found in everything from isolation to sex to outright gambling with life as we search for freedom. Aiko finds salvation in her own transparency and in the people, still alive, who give her a reason to carry on. It all comes back to sustaining the highest high that is love. Love and our insistence on it is the reason for every trip: the backdrop to all experiences, the strongest drug of all.


Marissa Nadler's second full-length by way of her own Box of Cedar imprint is her most narcotic album to date.

The Sister

To press play on any of Marissa Nadler's six albums is to enter a peaceful but painful dream. Since 2004, whether over the barebones creak of the early The Saga of Mayflower May or the synthetically textured Little Hells, Nadler's records of wispy melancholy have opened outwardly like arms, inviting the listener to stay for a permanent spell. Invariably hypnotic, Nadler's music has often felt like its own self-sustaining atmosphere-- ready and able to be inhabited, suited for the repeat button, surreal in its dream-like propensity to remove the listener from the rest of the world.
The Sister is Nadler's second full-length by way of her own Box of Cedar imprint in as many years, and she's possibly never made a record that so completely meets those sequestered conditions. These eight songs feel like a turn-on, drop-out experience, an engrossing reverie of complicated characters, their twisted feelings and Nadler's muted reverence for them. That's not necessarily the best look for Nadler, who, in spite of her albums' all-encompassing essence, has managed to squeeze at least one indelible standout into every record; Songs III, for instance, had "Bird on Your Grave", while last year's self-titled disc sported "The Sun Always Reminds Me of You" and "Wedding", all songs that stood apart from their settings while ably functioning within them. But these 33 minutes hang together to a fault, with songs trussed by a singular stylistic and sonic palette until the album as a whole actually starts to seem stiff. As always with Nadler, The Sister is still an absorbing listen, even if it is a bit conservative.
With the exception of the resilient, piano-anchored "Love Again, There Is a Fire", Nadler leads each song on The Sister with her acoustic guitar. For opener "The Wrecking Ball Company", the playing is simple and direct, with a short phrase thumbed through the steady drums and webbed vocals; during "Apostle", she refashions the celestial heights of James Blackshaw's 12-string compositions with modesty. Nadler's grown substantially as a guitarist, meaning that her notes are crisper and her lines more mesmeric. But she operates exclusively in those alternate modes-- that is, elegant or elementary-- across all of The Sister, meaning that the excellent supporting cast she's gathered here falls behind her direction rather than helping to drive it. Carter Tanton's intriguing electric textures on closer "Your Heart is a Twisted Vine" feel more like an accessory than a building block; ditto the spectral harmonies and the faint serial keyboards tacked onto the end of "Christine". Like the songs they support, there's nothing wrong with any of these moments. They just blur into one another, sublimating into a whole that's occasionally void of definition.
At various points throughout Nadler's career, there's been compulsory evidence to consider her something of a "breakout" artist. At the height of the freak-folk moment, she fell just short of the "alabaster queen" status that she later pledged; in the following years, she signed to Kemado Records, a label whose beard-and-beer-can metal and sleaze-ball rock roster didn't buoy Nadler toward many ideal audiences; when she subsequently lent her spook to an album by black-metal mystery Xasthur, she again missed her chance to connect wholesale with an expanding crowd. Last year, it felt as if she was giving herself a new start by crowd-funding her first self-titled release on her own label; that record, in retrospect, seems impregnably confident and adventurous, where several perfect bits of country loneliness came countered by a half-dozen variably gothic trances. The Sister is Nadler's most narcotic album to date, and she also continues to sharpen her skills as a writer, beguiling with alliteration and distant images that should cause listeners to daydream with wonder. But The Sister ultimately comes across as, at best, a retread done well and, at worst, a retreat into previously approved territory by an artist who has noticeably improved as a tactician.
In this way, The Sister recalls clear Nadler forebear Buffy Sainte-Marie, another songwriter who, at her best, built albums that felt apart from the rest of the world, even as they wove together the very familiar and the very abstract. (Like Nadler, she also had a way with Leonard Cohen songs.) Sainte-Marie surrounded occasional great albums with stacks of entirely good, functional music, never able to progress definitively despite obvious improvements on multiple fronts. Still, there's no shame in a string of albums that are at least "entirely good," a streak that Nadler has yet to break-- even if The Sister feels like the first minor album of her career.


Like bassist and vocalist Eamon Sandwith’s already iconic bowl-cut/mullet combo, Get Fucked is militaristic severity up front, party in the back.

Get Fucked

The history of punk rock is rife with underground aggressors who enjoy a surprise brush with mainstream notoriety thanks to an atypically sunny song that teeters precariously close to novelty-tune status. So the crossover success of the Chats is all the more remarkable given that it came through their surliest song. With the 2017 single “Smoko,” the Australian trio not only scored an anti-social anthem that’s since been covered by the likes of YUNGBLUD and Wet Leg, they also transformed regional vernacular—in this case, Aussie slang for “smoke break”—into an international catchphrase. Vividly channeling the boiled-blood irritation of a service-industry worker who’d sooner gut you than waste a precious second of their five-minute puff session making idle conversation, “Smoko” nonetheless possessed the sort of Seinfeldian relatability that landed the then-teenaged band on morning shows and the 6 o’clock news back home. But since then, the Chats have hardly gone out of their way to make themselves more respectable for the masses. The best songs on their 2020 debut High Risk Behaviour concerned venereal disease, getting caught wanking on webcam, and gorging yourself on rump steak. Now their second album comes bearing a title that’s practically begging to get them disinvited from the late-night talk show circuit.
Get Fucked is everything you want a Chats album to be: fast, crass, and loaded with more instantly quotable Aussie idioms than Crocodiles Dundee and Hunter put together. But it’d be wrong to say Get Fucked simply serves up sloppy seconds from their proverbial pub feed. This is a portrait of a changed band: Once the pride of the small Sunshine Coast surfing town of Coolum Beach, the Chats are now based 90 minutes south in the big city of Brisbane, a relocation that pays immediate dividends in the form of “I’ve Been Drunk in Every Pub in Brisbane,” which is kind of what Wire’s Pink Flag would sound like if all the lyrics were Yelp reviews. But the album is also their first without founding guitarist Josh “Pricey” Price, who played the grubby goofball foil to perpetually pent-up bassist and vocalist Eamon Sandwith. With Sandwith’s snarl now the uncontested focal point, the Chats sound both more agitated and absurd than ever. Like Sandwith’s already iconic bowl-cut/mullet combo, Get Fucked is militaristic severity up front, party in the back.
Even as the Chats skate on the edge where street punk blurs into hardcore, they still retain the shout-it-loud bonhomie of classic ’70s rock. This is a band that’s always put Cosmic Psychos and Kiss on the same piss-stained pedestal, a veritable Oi-C/DC that’s in awe of rock’n’roll’s high-voltage power and pint-sloshing communalism yet fully aware of its inherently ridiculous macho posturing. And so the opening “6L GTR” is a muscle-car manifesto for 90-pound weaklings who know nothing about automobiles, a buzzsaw-riffed ode to a hot-rod model that doesn’t actually exist; in live versions of the song, Sandwith has taken to slipping in the car-seat seduction monologue from Van Halen’s “Panama,” a move that underscores the fact Sandwith will never be a ladies’ man on par with David Lee Roth in his ’80s golden-god prime while acknowledging the Chats’ spiritual debt to hard rock’s original pranksters.
But as much as the Chats seem like the kind of band that would happily bait a stadium full of Guns N’ Roses fans (an opportunity they’ll get to indulge this fall), they take equal glee in subverting the stern-faced pose of punk. Their songs are so preoccupied with life’s everyday annoyances—from public-transit ticket inspectors (“Ticket Inspector”) to panic attacks (“Panic Attack”) to getting paid late (“Paid Late”)—and so proudly unpoetic that their frustration and aggression can’t help but come out sounding joyful and celebratory. The addition of rockabilly-schooled guitarist Josh Hardy—of fellow Sunshine Coast garage combo the Unknowns—also allows a little more sunshine into the Chats’ self-described “shed rock,” whether he’s answering the blitzkrieged charge of “Struck by Lightning” with “doo-woo-doo-wop” hooks, rerouting the chugging surfer-dude beatdown “Emperor of the Beach” into a bluesy swing, or contributing the congenial, 1963-bound closer “Getting Better,” which stakes out the middle ground between the toga party and the circle pit.
And yet, as with “Smoko,” Get Fucked’s value goes beyond comically deranged depictions of mundane scenarios. Despite specializing in the kind of songs that’ll send non-Aussies scurrying to decipher the significance of Boggo, Beefy’s, and “hoonin’ down the Bruce,” the Chats are ultimately tapping into universal anxieties. “Smoko” isn’t merely about some asshole sitting on a milk crate and puffing away; it’s about an economy where workers are run so ragged that they can’t even enjoy their brief moments of respite. On Get Fucked, the Chats present a sequel of sorts in “The Price of Smokes,” a song that’s reportedly been on the backburner for a few years, but whose release is perfectly timed for this moment of inflationary angst. Cruising on a steady, post-punky bass groove, with Hardy’s leads stretched into a psychedelic smear, Sandwith repeats the line, “The price of smokes is going up again/I could already barely afford my rent”—and he sounds seriously torn by the choice between cigarettes and shelter. At nearly four minutes, it’s practically a prog song by this band’s standards, a gradually intensifying surge in lieu of their usual instant stage-dive strikes. But it’s a reflection of both the Chats’ evolution and that of the world at large—the ticking time bomb soundtrack to an increasingly unfair society where you’re now in danger of being priced out of a smoko.


Two decades into their career, Spoon return with loud, low-down, melodious rock record almost without sacrificing any of their savory nuance and inscrutability.

Lucifer on the Sofa

Wind Britt Daniel any tighter and he still won’t burst. For 20 years, Spoon have recorded wary, taut, almost-rock songs whose minimalist trappings contain maximalist urges. Paranoia is Daniel’s muse, a paranoia unmoored from referents—recognizable ones at any rate. “Everything Hits at Once,” “Don’t Make Me a Target”—it always feels like somebody’s watching Britt. Their tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, sets aside the electronic gewgaws of Hot Thoughts and They Want My Soul for Spoon’s loudest record yet. These songs, at last, rock in every sense of the word; they even refer at times to recognizably heterosexual scenarios to which Daniel has alluded on songs like “The Mystery Zone.” And the Austin quintet pulls it off without Daniel sacrificing any of their savory inscrutability. A lover? Sure. A target? Not so fast.
Proving their fealty to the usual career arcs, Spoon followed the Experimental Album with the Back to Basics Album, assembled over two years and aggravated by COVID worries (as if Daniel needed something else to chew his fingernails about). Mark Rankin, who has produced Queens of the Stone Age and Adele, joins Dave Fridmann and Justin Raisen in thickening the mix. You can hear the money on “The Hardest Cut” and the Smog cover “Held,” where the instruments tear a hole in the sky. The new bassist Ben Trokan locks in with longtime drummer Jim Eno, perfecting the welcome looseness with which the band experimented on Hot Thoughts.
If music were clothes, Spoon’s would be a fitted shirt; they named a 2001 song after one. Their preppy sternness and the intermittent submission to supervised anarchy—so much depends on the erotic allure of Daniel’s six-string squalls, manipulated with the ease of a casanova who has calculated the impact of a messy kiss. His chalky bray, an amalgam of Texas country dudes and English pubsters like Nick Lowe, is a match. Assisted by recruit Gerardo Larios and multi-instrumentalist Alex Fischel, the loudest songs reek of sex. On “Satellite” Daniel becomes a lonely planet boy in orbit around a beloved, wagging his finger: “I know where you draw the line/I know what you draw it for.” The title track centerpiece, an aural sequel to They Want My Soul’s “Inside Out,” observes a flâneur cruising up Lavaca in skinny-ass jeans hearing Dale Watson tunes in his head. Like Bryan Ferry in Roxy Music’s “Street Life,” he hears poetry in white noise. Sampled sax bleats echo the traffic; Fischel’s electric piano lines reflect the blue mood.
These admissions of ardor are forthright—Daniel is the least accidental of songwriters—but you can be forthright and vague too. Whether, ick, remarking on “God walking in the room softly” on “Astral Jacket,” or, ugh, toying with conventionality on “My Babe,” he’s like a candidate for public office taking a position; he’s passionate about coming across as passionate. He has welcome relapses, though. Those guitars crackle on “Feels Alright,” a declaration of aloneness with more conviction than the valentines; he gets how our culture regards couplehood as an emblem of maturity. “On the Radio” even summons the paranoia of yore for an account of Daniel’s device keeping tabs on him, which, in 2022, well, why not.
Determined to give fans a jolly time after a five-year absence, Lucifer on the Sofa doesn’t let up and won’t change minds. Range, like relationships, means shit with enthusiasm this committed and with consistency this compelling. Yet I miss the darker moods evoked on Hot Thoughts’ “WhisperI’llistentohearit,” on which Daniel, over an electronic pulse, issues threats with the zest of a professional cad. Lucifer’s pleasures assert the pure good of form—for example, the oblique Stones quote in Fischel’s piano part for the Jack Antonoff co-write (!) “Wild.” A rangy sensualist for whom playing the reprobate gives him an excuse to play with cool pedals and stuff, Daniel lets his guitars flesh out his suggestive, gnomic verse, and he moves me in mysterious ways (I should know). The hint of menace—the way the vague warnings come disguised as songs—keeps him alert during this permanent standoff with an unnamed enemy.

Buy: Rough Trade


Erin Birgy’s fifth album feels like the heartfelt expression of a uniquely weird viewpoint. It flits from groovy jazz to psych-pop to sylvan folk with freaky glee.

Dolphine

“Never smother the mystical song that rests deep inside you,” Erin Birgy murmurs midway through Dolphine, her fifth record as Mega Bog. Since adopting the moniker 10 years ago, the Los Angeles-based musician has lived out this sagely maxim. Her music overflows with images of hidden scorpions, blue salamanders, writhing snakes, and a flesh-eating troll. Despite its inscrutability, Dolphine feels genuine—the heartfelt expression of a uniquely weird viewpoint.
The album is partially inspired by the otherworldly writings of the late Ursula K. Le Guin, who once said of the label “science fiction”: “My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.” Dolphine similarly flits from groovy jazz to psych-pop to sylvan folk with freaky glee. Birgy’s idiosyncrasies bear resemblance to the off-kilter lyricism of Cate Le Bon or Aldous Harding, the elastic voice of Jessica Pratt, or the cosmic guitar reverence of Big Thief, whose drummer James Krivchenia, a frequent Mega Bog collaborator, engineered the album. But Dolphine pushes further into uncharted realms, where any rules about conventional melodies and lyrical coherence deteriorate.
Opener “For the Old World” wobbles on a slack tightrope, always threatening to tumble into chaos. The song springs between twinkling percussion, smooth jazz, and prickly tension; a woodwind zigzags erratically in the background like a shrill songbird. Melodic shapes undulate to a hidden logic on “Fwee Again,” an instrumental odyssey that references a made-up word for joyful epiphanies from 2017’s Happy Together. Birgy is once again backed on these adventures by a crew of collaborators—among them Krivchenia (percussion, effects), Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy (guitar), and iji’s Zach Burba (synth, bass)—whose performances enrich her remarkably peculiar stories.
Yet Birgy is not a storyteller in the traditional, linear sense. Rather, she strings crisp and enigmatic fragments into enchanting collages. “Crazy Kermin in the hall/Shadow plant leaf bleats/Piano stumbling/I forgot all your songs,” goes “I Hear You Listening (To the Bug on My Wall).” “As foxes bloat up Eastern expressway shoulders/Aloe breaks an arm,” she burbles on “Untitled (With ‘C’).” Much like a Le Guin novel, these sentences throw you into fully formed worlds without a map. But immersion encourages acclimation. Birgy explains the process plainly on “Shadows Break”: “The language erodes and unearths me more.”
Exploring this new world reveals abstract expressions of pain and loss, both specific and existential. “And now I’m crying like a spider in the sun/It’s not fear, or sadness, or even aches/It’s just living/Long, long, long,” she aches on the curliquing “Left Door.” “Untitled (With ‘C’)” was written for Philando Castile, the Minnesota man killed by a cop during a traffic stop. “Another murder should still disturb you/Delivered like clubhouse music to a white supremacy/Loneliness like this one cannot last,” Birgy sings over mournful bass in a rare unambiguous moment. Midway through the record is “Spit in the Eye of the Fire King,” a duet written by and performed with Ash Rickli, a Georgia musician who later passed away suddenly. Though the song’s cheery folksiness is an outlier, its presence underlines Birgy’s appreciation of the mystical implications of life beyond death.
The personal significance of these losses can sometimes be so heavily cloaked as to feel impenetrable. Yet there’s something refreshing about Birgy’s unapologetic commitment to her inner code. This is her reality, and sometimes it can be stranger—and certainly more poetic—than fiction. “Diary of a Rose” plays with a double meaning of the word “rose,” referencing both the shrub and the name of Birgy’s childhood horse to tie together images of flower-induced mania and the animal lounging in grass. The gentle “Truth in the Wild” may or may not be a love song, but it concludes with a clear and profound declaration of desire: “I want to be with the one I love/I want to play with the one I love.”
It’s tempting to use the word “surreal” to describe the visionary world Birgy conjures. Her songs teem with colorful metaphors, recurring characters, and dreamlike arrangements, like a Leonora Carrington painting set to music. But often “surreal” is confused with fantasy or hallucination, illogical outpourings of the subconscious thrown together for eccentric value. Even at its most inexplicable, there’s not a moment on Dolphine that feels careless. As her imagination roams, Birgy understands that sometimes irrationality is necessary to make sense of reality.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This 4xCD set offers a look at mid-20th century Detroit blues, anchored by a generous selection of rarities by John Lee Hooker. Despite its subtitle, Garden City Blues doesn’t really chronicle a scene so much as it documents a transitional period in blues history.

Various Artists: Garden City Blues: Detroit’s Jumping Scene 1948-1960

John Lee Hooker’s chugging guitar emerges from a swamp of static. An unidentified pianist interjects simple flourishes barely audible above the din of scratches and scrapes on the acetate. But then Hooker’s voice enters, emphatic and sturdy, weary yet randy as he begs a woman to relieve his sorrows. Her name is illegible (Essie Mae? Ethel May?), but the desire borders on desperation: "I want you to drive my blues away." "Rocks" is not one of Hooker’s best tunes, but it does project a certain charisma that would later come into greater focus. It’s notable for being one of the first recordings Hooker made after leaving Memphis and arriving in Detroit in the late 1940s, a tenure that would produce some of his most famous hits—including 1948's massive "Boogie Chillen". As such, "Rocks" is the anchor of a new 4xCD set from the UK label JSP Records, a fanfare that set Detroit blues rolling and tumbling for more than a decade.
Hooker was the focal point for the scene, and he gets more than a full disc of tracks—35 in all, a number that reflects both his early arrival in Detroit and his heavy studio schedule. Neil Slaven, the producer and historian who penned the liners for Garden City Blues, sounds almost apologetic about some of his cuts: "There’s none of the personality in his guitar playing that we came to expect. He’s not helped by a pedestrian pianist even more limited than he was at the time." Especially compared to Hooker’s most popular hits (many of which were recorded in Detroit yet have been omitted from this compilation), these tracks may sound rudimentary, but together they add up to more than just a prologue to his career. Each one indulges some new whim or tries out some new trick: "Boogie Woogie" moves with such an exaggerated strut that even the poor quality of the recording can’t diminish its cocky exuberance, and "Christmas Time Blues" slows a jingle-bell melody down to a crawl before disrupting the lament with loud, percussive strums.
Hooker comes across as a musician of formidable ability and charisma, so it’s little wonder that he played with most of the other artists on Garden City Blues. Eddie Kirkland was his touring partner, Eddie Burns backed him on harmonica. Obviously they all borrowed from him, just as he no doubt learned a few things from them, but they developed their own styles. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this box set is its range: Detroit obviously encouraged a great deal of variation and innovation, such that the rhythms, the structures, and even the lineups vary from one track to the next and certainly from one artist to the next. Some of these artists provide their own accompaniment, picking on a guitar while stomping on the floor, while others bring in one or two other players. Big Jack Reynolds brings in a full band for his sole track, "Going Down Slow", recorded sometime in the early 1960s, and his unidentified drummer takes off in the first measure and turns the song into a pounding proto-garage rocker.
That loose parameters of the Detroit scene also permits some entertaining oddities, especially the Richard Brothers’ "Stolen Property". Recorded in 1959, it starts as a fairly run-of-the-mill blues number, with the siblings lamenting an unfaithful woman and laying down a jumpy blues riff. Soon, however, they veer into a bit of comic playacting, with one brother playing a pistol-wielding husband and the other a movie-house usher trying to minimize the violence. "Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, there’s a man in the inside of the theater with another man’s wife, and HE’S OUTSIDE WITH A .45!" The whole place empties out in just a few seconds, leaving the brothers to deliver the inevitable punchline. It’s an odd bit of humor—part radio play, part vaudeville routine—but nearly 60 years after its creation, it works as a winking parody of the violence so often described in blues lyrics.
Despite its subtitle, Garden City Blues doesn’t really chronicle a scene so much as it documents a transitional period in blues history. The early and mid-20th century saw millions of African-Americans leaving mostly agrarian jobs in the South for the promise of work at factories in Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, and other areas thriving in the new industrial era. The Great Migration coincided with great leaps in recording technology, and blues musicians began to gravitate toward electric guitars. This was industrial music before it became a rock subgenre—before rock itself was even a genre—and the new sounds allowed players to do things in urban venues that had been unimaginable in the farmland juke joints many of them had left behind.
The shift from acoustic to electric wasn’t instantaneous, but gradual. It took years for ideas to develop and conventions to gel, and the music collected on Garden City Blues documents that period of transition, when old styles and methods mingled with new. As such, the set may not be the best point of entry for anyone unfamiliar with what led to this music and what followed it. (For primers, either of Smithsonian Folkways’ Classic Blues comps is recommended, as is the 1992 box set Chess Blues.) But there is still a great deal to discover and appreciate here: spirited performances depicting a lively city that prized jumpy grooves, idiosyncratic swagger, and dogged innovation above all else.


When they recorded 2015’s late-career highlight The Waterfall, MMJ wrote enough material for two albums. If the original was about conflict, the new volume concerns the healing that comes after.

The Waterfall II

Before My Morning Jacket released The Waterfall back in 2015, Jim James was already teasing a follow-up. He mentioned that the band’s sessions in Stinson Beach, California, just north of San Francisco, were so productive that they left with at least two full-lengths’ worth of material. They considered releasing a double album and quickly abandoned that idea, instead splitting the songs into two distinct records, the second of which was originally slated for 2016. On the heels of that release, however, the band got caught up touring and James got busy writing a bunch of material, and that follow-up became known as their “lost” album. “It still exists,” James assured Rolling Stone in 2017.
And now it finally exists for the rest of us. The surprise release of The Waterfall II ends the longest drought of new music in their 20-year career, but this isn’t really a lost album like Neil Young’s Homegrown. It doesn’t tell us anything about My Morning Jacket that we didn’t already know, and it doesn’t pose any what-ifs or prompt speculation about alternative timelines. Instead, it’s just more My Morning Jacket music: solid but seldom revelatory, new yet familiar. “Spinning My Wheels” opens with a dark cloud of buzzing static, which is quickly dispelled by a woozy keyboard theme—a simple, quiet demonstration of music’s power to provide clarity and direction. “I’ve been wrong for so long,” James sings, “risking my life for the sake of the song.”
This might be a reference to his manic schedule during the early ’00s, when My Morning Jacket were touring constantly and James’ health suffered, leading to an incident during the Waterfall sessions when he herniated a disc in his back and was bedridden for two months. Is that busy schedule worth it, he seems to be asking himself, especially when you’re just doing it so you can do it again and again? Typically an album ends with such an epiphany, but The Waterfall II opens with that declaration and carries it through nine more songs. If its predecessor was about conflict and healing—it’s My Morning Jacket’s thorniest album, emotionally speaking—then this follow-up is more about what comes after that healing.
It makes for a busier-sounding album. My Morning Jacket have always savored the collision of disparate styles and sounds (remember that cover of Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls”?), but lately that’s become a more prominent tactic for them. The band constructed several songs on The Waterfall by digitally piecing together bits of different recordings, and the resulting arrangements moved in weird, unexpected ways that could be thrilling in their unpredictability. Those moments sound a little  more scripted here. “Still Thinkin’” morphs from a chorus that recalls Herman’s Hermits into a crushed-velvet coda that’s closer to King Crimson, and while anything that places those two acts in the same sentence can’t be all bad, the pivot sounds disjointed and disorienting. “Climbing the Ladder” better integrates its varied sounds, marrying a two-tone rhythm section to some hyperactive honky-tonk guitars, like the Specials winning over a crowd in Bakersfield, but the equation still sounds a bit too clever.
The best moments here are the most direct, the least demonstrative. We’ve heard My Morning Jacket in slow-jam mode many times before, but “Feel You” sounds weightless, its guitar arpeggios like fingers down a lover’s spine. It’s less about sex than the seduction beforehand and the languid moments afterwards, and My Morning Jacket don’t add anything extraneous to break that spell. On “Magic Bullet” they establish a lurching, squelchy beat and let it run its course; it never resolves, never uncoils, even as they layer more guitars and more saxophone on top of it. The song doesn’t veer from that straight line, and that restraint is what makes it sound so tense and frenetic.
“I wonder where the time went,” James sings delicately on the closer “The First Time,” which sounds like one of many acknowledgements of the many years in between The Waterfall and The Waterfall II. Right now 2015 feels like a completely different geologic time period, so these songs can’t help but convey a sense of poignancy in their reminiscences. In that regard its surprise release is well timed; this satellite album, forever orbiting another, better record, may never escape its gravity, but it does ultimately carve out its own character and declare its own commentary. “Can tomorrow feel like it did back in the past?” James asks, once again soaring up into his famous falsetto. He makes it sound like this was his plan all along—to delay the release of these songs until that interim actually meant something and made them sound even better.

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The Japanese multi-instrumentalist enlists Jim O’Rourke for an unusual fusion of jazz improv, musique concrète, and plaintive pop that pays tribute to Law & Order’s Jack McCoy.

For McCoy

Eiko Ishibashi’s career is punctuated with stark contrasts. In only the last few years, the Japanese multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter has dabbled in free-form electronics, lush chamber piano, and saccharine pop tunes for the score of a potentially Oscar-nominated film, continuing a process of self-reinvention that has been a through line of her solo career since the start. It’s not uncommon for an ambitious artist to work across a range of genres, but what stands out about Ishibashi is how deep she can go in any direction; her experimental work lies far out in left field, yet her pop songs can be exceptionally precious. Her myriad styles often run along parallel tracks, rarely intermingling. “It’s like all these things that were coexisting in myself weren’t coexisting in one piece of music,” Ishibashi told Tone Glow in 2020. In 2018, The Dream My Bones Dream tore down the walls that had kept Ishibashi’s talents partitioned, synthesizing disparate influences into a personal work that uses its dramatic fluctuations to build an audible narrative. Ishibashi would return to developing her interests separately for a while, but they were destined for another collision course once she had another story to tell. For McCoy represents another marker of progress for the ever-changing musician.
Ishibashi wrote For McCoy—self-released in 2021, now reissued by Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle with a new mix courtesy of Ishibashi’s frequent collaborator and fellow jack-of-all-trades Jim O’Rourke—as a tribute to Law & Order’s iconic Jack McCoy, Ishibashi’s favorite character from her favorite TV drama. The long-running criminal procedural is a constant in Ishibashi’s daily life, serving as background noise when O’Rourke and Ishibashi cook and eat dinner together. “Almost every day when I was making For McCoy, [Jack McCoy’s] voice was always echoing through the house,” Ishibashi said in an interview with Tone Madison. The composer frequently uses field recordings in her music as a means of paying homage to the everyday sounds that inspire her, so it made sense to treat Jack McCoy with a similar reverence. “Because McCoy’s personal life is rarely discussed in the drama, I wanted to scoop it up with my music,” she said.
With an ensemble of her closest collaborators in tow—including O’Rourke, percussionist Joe Talia, and saxophonist Daisuke Fujiwara—Ishibashi takes a tour through the musical styles that have captured her fascination in the years since The Dream My Bones Dream. For McCoy rests somewhere in that nexus of improvisational jazz, musique concrète, and plaintive pop music.
The lion’s share of the LP is taken up by the 35-minute “I can feel guilty about anything,” which plays out like a wordless drama. The track opens with a porous layering of descending flute melodies—reminiscent of the ascending flute in Law & Order’s main theme—before melting away against a warm swell of synthesizer and voice. Talia dances in with a darting cymbal fill before locking into a steady rhythm, while Fujiwara weighs in with small bites of saxophone. Each moment is given a distinct but fleeting shape before giving way to the next, like a series of scenes that set the stage for McCoy to move through.
The piece begins to loom larger as it transitions to the second side of the LP, with violin slowly surging from a low to high register against a backdrop of unintelligible speech. It’s evocative of a point of conflict, perhaps a presentation of oral arguments in the courtroom. As the music oscillates between modes, coalescing into something resembling song and dispersing back into formlessness, it invites the listener to imagine where McCoy might be and what he might be feeling. Ishibashi introduces a sweet vocal melody near the end of the piece, stretching it out to a suspenseful infinity—is this the end of McCoy’s story, or an indication that there’s more to come? Ishibashi’s personal stake in the narrative is palpable, and it’s hard not to feel invested yourself.
Ishibashi teases bits of sonorous melody throughout the half-hour cinematic suite, finally crystallizing them into a sparkling jewel on the album’s short coda, “Ask me how I sleep at night.” Joining Ishibashi’s soaring flute is a rhythm section of Tatsuhisa Yamamoto on drums and O’Rourke on double bass, with tinges of wistful saxophone and guitar. The groove is striking in its contrast to the amorphous organism preceding it, but doesn’t feel jarring. Ishibashi has built up to this conclusion skillfully, foreshadowing hints with the flourish of a seasoned storyteller. It’s a cut to the credits, putting a cap on the bittersweet tale of a hardened district attorney. For McCoy plays to Eiko Ishibashi’s most potent strength, utilizing the pull of polar extremes to simulate the ups and downs of a gripping drama.

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Martha’s sophomore LP offers fodder for critical thought that can be digested while pogoing.

Blisters in the Pit of My Heart

Since their inception in 2012, Durham, England punk poppers Martha have existed as a collective effort between Nathan Stephens-Griffin (drums), Naomi Griffin (bass), JC Cairns (guitar) and Daniel Ellis (guitar). The four share vocal and writing credits in a fashion that reflects their collective DIY, anarchist, vegan politics. Martha’s 2014 debut LP Courting Strong received positive praise for its autobiographical accounts of underdog outsiders told through extremely catchy hooks, anthemic outpourings, and plainspoken honesty. Perhaps most critical to Martha’s success on Courting Strong, and now on their sophomore effort Blisters in the Pit of My Heart, is their effortless fusion of pop and politics. It’s a relief to hear a record that acknowledges our disappearing freedoms and is still fun. Rather than leaving listeners exhausted with ideas, Blisters offers fodder for critical thought that can be digested while pogoing. As Stephens-Griffin explained in an interview, “We do politics, but we play pop.”
A fine example of this is “Goldman’s Detective Agency,” which goofily reimagines early 20th century anarchist Emma Goldman as a private investigator. Its initial goofiness (gumshoe is too underused as a synonym for detective) is suddenly crushed by a quiet blow delivered over twinkly guitars: There is no one I can trust/And the cops are so corrupt/All protected by the politicians/In these wicked cults.” “St Paul’s (Westerberg Comprehensive)” is a story about queer students at catholic school. The Paul in question, however, is the of the holy Replacements sect and the fear described is much more intimate than the misuse of government. Inspired by Let it Be song “Androgynous,” “St. Paul’s” highlights individuals who defy the norms placed on them by society. Again and again, Martha remind us that love unjustly deemed dangerous by institutions like the church is ultimately a powerful tool of hope.
A political edge continues to line Blister’s more overtly romantic songs. In the careening “Christine,” memories of a “passion forged under a four pound box of wine” are poignant enough to last through an imminent nuclear war. For Martha, happily-ever-after looks like something out of “Love and Rockets” (“It’s the story of/A lonely kid who fell in love/When you spray painted ‘ACAB’ on the wall/Of the local village hall,” they sing on “Curly and Raquel.”) Blister’s most stirring moment arrives on “Ice Cream and Sunscreen,” which is at various moments across its brief two minutes, desolate, self-critical, and dangerously swept away and distracted by unrequited love. After an initial intro told over quiet guitars, passion suddenly explodes like fireworks and the narrator loses all anxiety in a fit of power chords. Martha are negotiating the intersections of reality and emotionality, and sometimes their idealism swells and spills over the brim. At times it may feel cheesy, or like “naive romantic shite” as they say at one point, but in the end, it’s honestly comforting.


Great, cohesive albums often have messages or statements embedded in\r\n\ the lyrics and musical attitude. As a highly ...

Romantica

Great, cohesive albums often have messages or statements embedded ir the lyrics and musical attitude. As a highly respected and highly paid music critic, it's my job to sniff out these themes and present them to you, the reader. After spending some quality time listening to Luna's sixth album, taking extensive notes, and applying the most complex theories of musicology, I think I have unlocked Romantica's secret: Dean Wareham be getting laid!
Of course, I have absolutely no concrete facts to back this up-- it's a conclusion based on equal parts hunch and dirty mind. Nevertheless, I haven't heard a collection of songs this infused with post-coital glow since Björk's heavy-breathing exercise Vespertine. But while Ms. Gudmundsdottir's love songs are set in the wintery climate of her home country, Wareham pens tunes appropriate to the album's springtime shimmer, images of lovestruck springs and summer picnics in the park.
I mean, come on, the album's called Romantica, the cover art is a Caribbean souvenir cigarette lighter, and the leadoff track's name is "Lovedust," for crying out loud. While a song called "Lovedust" that talks about seeing "a million, billion, trillior stars" could just as easily be about the demon cocaine, the Jimmy Buffett-style guitar effects and the "air is creamy/ You look so dreamy" lyrics suggest otherwise. Throw in the sultry backing vocals of super-hott new bass player Britta Phillips, and you've got the indie rock world's answer to that steamy Robbie Williams/Nicole Kidman duet.
Not that the majority of Romantica is much of a sonic departure from Luna's back catalog, a series of albums that don't feature much in the way of experimentation. Wareham's songwriting formula has varied little since his hyper-influential days in Galaxie 500: hazy minor chord vamps behind his thinly wistful singing voice. Since the peak of this approach on the band's classic Penthouse, Luna have made a number of small attempts to stretch out their sound, but Wareham's easily recognizable voice kept the songs from deviating too much from the mean.
The same appraisal goes for Romantica, despite the presence of esteemed producer Dave Fridmann; nobody's going to be fooled into thinking this isn't a Luna album. Fridmann's influence is remarkably subtle, wisely keeping his characteristic thick drum sound to a minimum to preserve the band's slight aesthetic. Only the grandiose "Black Champagne," with it's orchestra-in-a-can strings swelling Soft Bulletin-style around Wareham's plea to "train the disco lights on me" overtly reveals his presence behind the boards.
What separates the album from previous Luna product is not so much instrumental alterations as the newly unabashed sentimentality of Wareham's lyrics. The twelve songs find Wareham largely rhapsodizing about food, love, or both, with stanzas like "Salt and pepper squid/ And Singapore noodles/ I could look at your face/ For oodles and oodles," from "Renee Is Crying." Okay, yeah, wher written out, lines like that probably have you puking on your computer monitor. But if anything can pull it off without triggering the gag reflex, it's Wareham's doe-eyed voice, which practically has cartoon hearts bouncing around it.
The band, meanwhile, further brightens the mood with "ba ba ba" backing vocals and arrangements more peppy and muscular than or previous efforts. Phillips' vocals contribute the most obvious new elements, tradingoff singing with Wareham on "Mermaid Eyes," the band's sexiest song since Penthouse's cover of Serge Gainsbourg's "Bonnie and Clyde" with Laetitia Sadier. Instrumentally, the quartet have never sounded so confidently loose, with nearly every song spiraling off into guitar soloing sessions that would perk up the ears of jamband followers, were they not faded out after a minute or two.
Unfortunately, the album takes a dive after the first seven tracks into less memorable territory, without a big ending like "Bonnie and Clyde" or The Days of Our Nights' clever "Sweet Child O' Mine" cover. Chances are you'll hardly notice, however, as by this time the album has lured you into its fuzzy trap. With Romantica, Luna shows that they know their sound and their place: nothing too fancy, just solid, cheerful music for barbecue romance and driving with the windows down.


English Oceans is the first album since Drive-By Truckers' 2001 breakthrough Southern Rock Opera where the songwriting duties are split solely between Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley. In several aspects, it's a return to form.

English Oceans

Drive-By Truckers don’t owe us shit. They’ve never made a bad or even a mediocre album in their two decades, even though they’ve given themselves many opportunities to do so. And considering their occasionally acrimonious lineup changes and bold conceptual gambits, they’d have many valid excuses if that fate were to come to pass. But depending on your affinity for 2008’s generous-to-a-fault Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, it’s either been six years or 10 since their last truly great album. English Oceans isn’t great, but it’s not mediocre and certainly not bad—but its reception most likely will be predicated on whether or not you think Drive-By Truckers owe you anything more than a “Drive-By Truckers album.”
They seemed due for a shake up, particularly after the hiatus occurring following 2011’s Go-Go Boots. Bassist Shonna Tucker (who started contributing songs and vocals on Brighter) and pedal-steel specialist John Neff left the band, while founding members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley both made solo records. And in several aspects, this is a return to form; English Oceans is much more of a “rock” record than the Muscle Shoals-influenced Go-Go Boots, though DBT have retained enough groove to the point where there’s just as much Stones in their sound as there is Skynyrd, probably more so. And that’s a good thing, as they had the tendency to be a lumbering musical entity even during their peak days.
It’s also the first time since their 2001 breakthrough Southern Rock Opera where the songwriting duties are split solely between Cooley and Hood. More pointedly, it’s the first time the songwriting duties have been split equally. And that allows you to hear Drive-By Truckers in a completely different way, because not only does Cooley reestablish himself after being relegated to a bit player on Go-Go Boots and The Big To-Do, he actually puts this album on his back.
In the past, he hasn’t been underrated so much as overshadowed. Hood’s been often seen as DBT’s head and heart, whereas Cooley operates more from the gut and groin, the sidekick, the comic relief. Cooley still comes up with some instantly quotable, real-talk snark about the sad sex lives of white-collar supervisors (“Trophy tail wives taking boner pill rides for the price of a Happy Meal”) and a henpecked friend (“Said she only hollered when she'd stood as much as she could stand/ Jimmy's ego can take it ‘baby go on and fake it loud as you can’"). But he’s also developed a kind of redneck, cosmic profundity to rival that of early Isaac Brock. While still spoken in plain language, Cooley gets at the kind of accidental enlightenment available to intelligent, if undereducated men given repetitive tasks and a lot of time to mull over things. The construction worker on the shit-hot “Shit Shots Count” notes “Meat’s just meat and it's all born dying.../ Somebody's gotta mop up the A-1 somebody's gotta mop up the blood,” while a tumultuous relationship on “Natural Light” is “As cold as a loveless embrace/ Or hot like a low seething rage.”
Cooley’s superlative performance on English Oceans would be more worthy of celebration if it wasn’t negated by Hood’s most non-committal songwriting to date. “When He’s Gone”, “Til He’s Dead or Rises”, and “Pauline Hawkins” are all variations on the same inert gender dynamics, pro forma Dixie rock with gawky choruses that I suppose one could applaud for being lyrically succinct: “She can't stand to have him around/ But she always misses him when he's gone,” “love is like cancer/ And I am immune,” “She’ll ride him until he’s dead/ Or rises to the occasion.” But Hood never uses these sturdy, nondescript phrases to bear any additional detail or personality, and that’s problematic for a songwriter of his nature: there’s never been a strong melody or a killer riff that’s saved a lyrically weak DBT song.
The gap is even more clear when the duo delve into politics. Cooley’s “Made Up English Oceans” alternates the surreal and hyper-real in a manner similar to PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, invoking right-wing zealots and god-fearing religious factions while leaving worlds open to the interpretation. Conversely, Hood’s “The Part of Him” recalls the strawmanning that marred The Dirty South, leaning hard on stilted rhymes (“His integrity was phoning in/ Totally Nixonian”) and shrugged jokes about wingnuts and teabags. As with “Pauline Hawkins” and “When He’s Gone”, there’s no sense of place or humanity; it’s something Hood could’ve cooked up after a jag of "House of Cards", to say nothing of the likely inspiration for “When Walter Went Crazy”.
Which is to say that the truly great Drive-By Truckers albums may have been unified by a concept, but the great songs they’ve made throughout their career are inspired by real people, whether it’s “The Living Bubba”, George Wallace, the only people in America imprisoned for consensual incest, Buford Pusser, or Craig Lieske. If you don’t know the last name, he served as DBT’s merch guy, was a fixture in Athens’ music scene, and was remembered fondly by his community upon his death in January 2013. He’s the inspiration for English Oceans’ showstopping closer “Grand Canyon”, and it’s DBT’s most musically rich and expansive song to date, seven-minutes of acoustic guitars and vocals that positively gleam in waltz time. Hood’s lyrics are equally up to the task, a meditation on their last great memories with Lieske, the therapeutic value of the road and the supernatural. It’ll probably be their closer for the next decade, and if Drive-By Truckers are still touring in 10 years, that’s a good thing. For now, English Oceans ensures they’ll back on the road, where they’re still one of the best things going and Drive-By Truckers probably don’t owe us much more than that.


Allan Kingdom’s affecting bridge on Kanye West's “All Day” helped transform the song from a sleek ode to out-of-season shopping to a carefully pointed political screed. On Kingdom’s new mixtape, Northern Lights, the obvious connections between Kanye and the younger MC are stylistic.

Northern Lights

Last February, Kanye West brought 40 hoodied-and-masked-up men (and at least a couple of flamethrowers) to the front of the O2 Arena in London. They were assembled to perform “All Day,” which was then slated as a single from his still-unreleased seventh album. The song had been teased, in various unfinished states, for more than a year, but Allan Kingdom, the key player in the song’s final cut, made the trip abroad with less than two days notice, and hadn’t even unpacked when he hopped onstage. Kingdom’s affecting bridge on “All Day” helped turn the song from a sleek ode to out-of-season shopping to a carefully pointed political screed, one where all the parole hearings and Farrakhan meetings are grounded in something immediate and human.
On Kingdom’s new mixtape, Northern Lights, the obvious connections between West and the Winnipeg-born, St. Paul-bred Kingdom are stylistic. The younger MC favors a musical atmosphere that marries the brooding, synth-backed minor keys of 808s & Heartbreak to the more spare and visceral sounds Kanye has explored with Yeezus and “All Day.” Kingdom also enjoys some of Kanye’s everyman appeal circa The College Dropout and Late Registration, though he mines this territory less than the elder rapper. Here, weighty existential worries and simple practical hangups are allowed to simply exist next to one another; most of West’s music has dealt with, in some form, the tension between Benzes and backpacks. Allan Kingdom acknowledges both, but moves quickly onto other concerns.
When he does deal in moral panic, Kingdom is at his slickest. On “Hypocrite,” he laments, “You got fatter thighs than the one that I lied to”; on the title track, he says he’s “Trying to stack some fucking funds, fuck a lot, and have some fun,” and encourages his guest, “Leave your questions at the door, and your dress, like, half-undone.” A few songs later, on the Auto-Tune-drenched “I Feel Ya,” sex is far less trivial. The coda that includes “Tell me when to stop/ Tell me when to stop/ Feeling for you” and a warbled “I can make you feel better” is his strongest vocal performance on the tape—confused, guilty, defiant, naked.
Northern Lights clocks in just under 45 minutes, but plays even faster. “Believe” benefits from a pulsing house beat, and the production as a whole is more concerned with forward motion than with virtuosity. Kingdom’s time with the Stand4rd—the four-piece St. Paul collective that also includes the producer Psymun, the rapper, singer, and producer Bobby Raps, and Corbin, who was originally known as Spooky Black—has clearly served him well. His 2014 mixtape, Future Memoirs, was mostly excellent, but it was on the Stand4rd’s self-titled debut that he codified his raps into something that bent and cascaded into sharp, half-crooned records. While he surrenders hook duties a few times here (most notably to D.R.A.M., who sings about changing his cell number on “Renovate”), he’s more than capable of starting and finishing a dynamic song without ever leaving the booth.
Still, the strongest song on Northern Lights is the most autobiographical. “Interruption,” which is produced in part by the Minneapolis mainstay Ryan Olson, looks back at when Kingdom was darting from Hennepin Avenue through the city’s freeway system, lying that he’d lost his wallet to avoid paying for meals, and meeting Plain Pat, the manager that would eventually link him with West. Allan calls himself “the son of some immigrants, ‘bout to son ‘em like Africa.” And when he puts his life into plain language, it starts to come into light—the tension between the backpacks and Benzes is what set him in motion in the first place. What matters is where he goes next.


On its second album, the Australian group strips its melancholy electronic pop down to a whisper, nodding simultaneously to 1980s ennui and 2020s anxiety.

Acopia

Acopia’s melancholy electronic pop is homespun, but it sounds luxurious. Melbourne musicians Kate Durman, Morgan Wright, and Lachlan McGeehan are all pedigreed electronic producers in their own right; their work in this band is minimalist but purposeful, prizing drive and atmosphere even when the music is at its sparsest. A solitary horn pierces the electronic gloom on “We Evolve,” the opener of their self-titled second album, and it evokes the image of vocalist Durman as the dame in a film noir, looking out onto a rainy street for some shred of hope amid the gloom.
Acopia specialize in songs about loneliness and isolation. Throughout, Durman sings as if she were a ghost wandering among the living, her quiet, breathy voice often lying like a layer of mist between ominous post-punk guitars and icy programmed drums. “Acopia” is a medical term describing an inability to cope with daily life, and the lyrics here live up to that moniker. On “Be Enough,” Durman drifts through a party scene, her lyrics an endless stream of unanswered questions and pregnant pauses; on “Eyes Shut,” dissociation “feels like a drug” amid emotional strife. This is pop music for absentee friends and serial ghosters, where the lines, “I take you for granted/It’s just what I do, ooh” ring out like a singalong chorus.
Although that may sound ponderous on paper, Acopia is charged with tension. The band builds on its 2022 debut, Chances, a record of catchy, fragile songs set to altogether bolder and more forceful production, by making everything a little more muted. Acopia are one of a handful of groups in Melbourne that clearly worships at the altar of HTRK, a band that looms large in Australia’s experimental scene; on this record, Acopia smartly follow their lead in stripping their sound down to a whisper. This subtler palette yields a record that’s more dynamic than Chances. “Eyes Shut,” the album’s centerpiece, breaks through the fugue state like a battering ram. Powered by unrelenting sub-bass and McGeehan’s thundering drumming, it feels like the onset of the anxiety attack that’s been slowly building over the course of the record, a slow suffocation.
Acopia are hardly alone in specializing in feel-bad electronic pop, but they do feel especially 2020s in their outlook. Durman seemingly has every possible ultra-therapized line in her arsenal—“I need to zoom out,” “Maybe we could take it at my own pace,” “What is your intention?”—and still seems to feel totally horrible. Although songs like “Holding On” and “Intentions,” which recall classic 4AD bands, nod to romantic melodrama, their lyrical concerns are wan and banal: missed connections, miscommunications, listless interactions. Set against the band’s rich, nervy environments, this glazed-over, alienated tone makes for a record that’s both intimate and intense, dazed and direct—hardly a cure for modernity, but something that makes it easier to cope all the same.


The Oregon doom metal trio's newest, an expansive album that never takes the space it's been given for granted, is a reminder that, in this crowded field, there are simply those who do it better.

Atma

If you spend some time digging through interviews and profiles of YOB, you'll find the consensus on the long-running heavy-as-full-stacks army of Oregon's Mike Scheidt is that his band fits partially into nearly half a dozen interconnected subgenres: psychedelic rock, stoner rock, stoner metal, blues metal, and, most consistently, doom metal. From associated instruments to target demographics, several factors unite those niches, not least of which is the propensity to indulge a sound, solo, or song for minutes on end. As it is with High on Fire, so it is with Hawkwind, and as it is with Earth, so it is with Eyehategod: When a band latches onto something it loves, be prepared to go the distance.
YOB, it seems, is no different: "The Great Cessation", the title track of the trio's previous album, was a colossal 21-minute closer that took its time snaking through several obsessions, from the twinkling introduction and a throbbing mid-tempo midsection to a monolithic coda that felt like a great, malevolent sigh. Similarly, "Adrift in the Ocean" ends the band's latest LP Atma with a magnificent 16-minute rise: Middle Eastern-influenced guitars tessellate over teased cymbals until the full trio of Scheidt, drummer Travis Foster, and bassist Aaron Reiseberg lurches forward, rising and collapsing in thick, deliberate bursts for about eight minutes. Like its predecessor, Atma closes in a glorious burnout, Scheidt's post-rock-sized guitar solo ultimately smearing into a drone over a mangled drum limp.
One of YOB's chief accomplishments here and throughout much of its discography has been its sterling ability to maintain a sense of momentum, whether the track ends after five minutes or pushes into the teens. The shortest of Atma's five tunes, "Upon the Sight of the Other Shore", nears the eight-minute mark thanks to several Geezer Butler-gone-Godflesh verses and a handful of guitar solos. Its sense of constant movement, though, isn't unlike that of the preceding "Before We Dreamed of Two", the album's 16-minute, three-part marathon: In spite of languid riffs and an occasional absence of drums, "Dreamed" never sits anywhere for too long and, more important, never bores.
In several Eastern religions, atma means a more complete aware version of the self. Scheidt uses that word during the refrain (or mantra, maybe?) of "Dreamed", singing "Self reaching outward/ Toward within" at the apogee of the riff’s power. The bulk of Atma seems to be about some human realization that's more meaningful than the mundane, where change and finality and death and loss actually work toward something important. "Burning within from what must be/ The desire of the one to be witnessed," he howls as if caught in mid-strangulation at the end of the title track, a menacing swirl of drums and distortion at his back. You can hear those ideas throughout Atma, a record that never takes the space it's been given for granted. Each passing second feels like a chance for a new thought, a happy diversion. That's not what you expect from the stasis and slow shifts of doom metal or anything with which YOB is generally associated. It's exactly what makes every bit of Atma so very powerful.
If you were a novice forming a metal band in 2011, YOB's psychedelic heaviness might not be a bad place to start. It can, after all, be played at length with a basic riff, a drummer with some stamina and heavy hands, and a bassist that can find the roots of chords. It doesn’t require the speed of black metal, the equipment of drone, or the skill of death and technical metal. You don't even need an especially great singer: Scheidt is more communicative and versatile than dominating. What's more, it's a sound that's proven ripe for crossover into both indie rock and mainstream rock circles during the last decade. So why not? Indeed, there's a glut of bands currently mining post-Sabbath, after-Sleep stoner metal, playing lean, distorted riffs over clattering china. In that crowded lot, YOB should serve as a reminder that, even in more common forms, there are simply those who do it better-- through more experience, better conceits or, as is the case with Atma, a compelling mix of both. Scheidt's guitar tone is unimpeachable here, and he uses it as an unwavering guide for the trio: His riffs control the pushes and the pulls, the rises and the falls, the stops and the starts. And with YOB, a doom-stoner-sludge-psych band with too much thrust to fit into any of those holes for very long, that's the deciding, divining factor.


The Texas songwriter examines empathy in a series of probing and gemlike miniatures.

M for Empathy

For the past few years, Hannah Read has been in constant motion. Long drives were a part of her routine when living in small-town Silsbee, TX., and the isolating mobility of her extensive touring as Lomelda led to the inspiration for her 2017 album Thx. But the road is more than just a means to her physical destination—it cultivated a fixation with communication and understanding, which were hefty themes on Thx and have continued to provide fodder for new songs. Now, after transplanting herself to Los Angeles, Read takes a more contemplative turn, embracing brevity and modest production on her newest album M for Empathy.
Within her album’s very short sixteen minutes, Read reminds us of the intricacies and nuances of empathy. The task of understanding others is arduous: Read’s empathy is not a political magic bullet, but a personal exploration. On the opener “Talk,” she mentions her move to the Golden State as if she’s moving a few buildings down. “I need to be over there, four states a step a way,” she sings carefully. Her voice will make the 1,700-mile trek, communicating with those she’s moving closer to and those she’s traveling farther from.
Read cultivates a cozy pocket of sound for her choice topic’s delicate nature. Piano keys cascade during “Bust” and then glint on “M for Mush”; acoustic guitar strums are round and woody on “Tell” and then are bright and steady on “So Bad 2, Care.” With the help of her brother Tommy, Read stretches the calming tones and comforting sentimentality of these two instruments.  As a lyricist, Read uses small, poignant sentence fragments, repetition, and wordplay with incredible precision, capturing intimate snapshots within tiny frameworks. Despite the songs’ short lifespan—a minute and half on average—they feel expansive, shapeshifting like shadow puppets on a wall. “I thought of so many things to say to you/But what were they,” Read wonders aloud on “Bust.”  She repeats the latter fragment three times before tagging on “to you,” a subtle semantic layer that underscores the two-way mirror effect of trying to understand someone else’s perspective.
She takes some wild lyrical risks on the stunning “M for Mush”: “Must make myself a mold to hold my mushin magic mercy mind,” she sings.  Here, empathy is as pliable as playing with Play-Doh. But, M for Empathy’s most potent moments are when Read travels vast space, whether through an instrumental transition or an existential concern. Misunderstanding is not the only obstacle to empathy—death also has a troublesome way of intervening.“What If I die before I get to know ya more?” she asks on “M for Me,” her voice fragile.
Read understands that in many ways empathy is not completely possible. It’s not as simple as saying “I understand,” but reaching out to others and possibly saving someone’s life—on “Slide,” Read sings about depression and a friend’s phone call that saved her. She doesn’t perform empathy here; she investigates it. By erasing the extraneous detail from her lyrics, she leaves space for our imagination and even some room for us to insert ourselves.


The second album from the synth-pop group finds them getting anxious about their own ambition, a feeling that doesn't always gracefully adapt to the dance floor.

Content

The second full-length from Joywave practically bursts at the seams with discomfort, a sharp contrast from the synth-pop band’s hallmark dance grooves. On 2015’s How Do You Feel Now?, Joywave’s proper debut after two mixtapes and two EPs—grooves came quantized, shiny, and pre-inflated for getting arenas full of people bouncing in place. This time, as much as the new material contains darker pockets, it’s still a world away from the sweaty intimacy of clubs, where spontaneity and human contact rule the day.
This is an important distinction to make because frontman/bandleader Daniel Armbruster pretty much spends the entire new album lamenting his lack of connection to his surroundings. Right off the bat, over a spare synth figure and a soft thump that suggests the sound of a beating heart, Armbruster sings, “I’m searching for the difference between/What CON-tent and con-TENT can bring [...]/Maybe I’m just an algorithm with a given name but/I’m trying to find the difference.”
It’s an odd and gangly sentiment to hear from someone at the helm of a band that, musically speaking at least, is hell-bent on seizing mass-appeal by the horns. And as the mechanical beats gurgle and thump, advertising their commercial viability in letters large enough to be visible from space, Armbruster isn’t so much a ghost in the machine as a helpless presence unable to stand up to his own music.
“I’ve filled myself with doubt/I feel like I sold out” he sings over a rolling cadence on the aptly titled “Doubt.” The song encapsulates the album’s driving conflict perfectly: with more dynamics and room to breathe, “Doubt” could have matched the cresting and falling of the “panic playing out in black and white” that Armbruster tries to convey. Instead, the music proceeds with a cold precision that hits all the right spots but feels ruthless, especially in light of the distress signal the person inside the music appears to be sending.
According to these songs, success is a compulsory pursuit that just sweeps you away in its tide. “You deserve the finer things, you’re supposed to be famous,” Armbruster sings on “Little Lies You’re Told.” Of course, the push-pull between chase and catch, goal and reward, success and failure makes for extremely fertile ground for art. The problem is that Armbruster expects the audience to go along for the ride with an existential crisis that’s his to solve not ours to carry. The band’s creative backbone along with multi-instrumentalist/producer-programmer Sean Donnelly, Armbruster could’ve chosen differently.
For starters, he and Donnelly could have guided mixing engineer Rich Costey (Haim, Vampire Weekend, Fiona Apple) towards highlighting organic elements that would have served the subject matter. Instead, they shoot straight for the radio-friendly bullseye while Armbruster wrings his hands the whole way. By about the third song or so, the music makes you wonder: If you’re going to take this path, why not be resolute about it? And if you have these reservations, why not take a different path, then? Plus it seems just a little too early in Joywave’s career for Armbruster to sound as jaded as he does on “It’s a Trip!,” where he sings “There’s nothing left to want.”
Armbruster and Donnelly have clearly grown as songwriters, and Content hints at a subtlety that Joywave are capable of using to their advantage. On “Confidence,” essentially a lo-fi piano demo that sticks out defiantly right smack in the middle of the album, you can hear the piano’s sustain pedal release before Armbruster walks away and closes the door behind him. “When my confidence is gone,” he sings, “it helps to sing a little song /I find it helps.” Does it really, though? If Content’s songs are to be taken at face value, it’s hard not to have your doubts.


Inspired by Angels in America, the French artist’s latest album is a raw, dreamlike, 20-song epic that still feels like a first draft.

Christine and the Queens: Paranoïa, Angels, True Love

Paranoïa, Angels, True Love

Christine and the Queens’ last record, Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue), was a lengthy and labyrinthine concept album wrapped around a fuckboy alter ego. It should have been fun, but the music was plodding and unwieldy, with none of the ebullience that has become Chris’ trademark, and the lore of the mysterious, begloved Redcar overpowered the music itself. Paranoïa, Angels, True Love thankfully sheds some Redcar impulses—Chris is no longer hiding behind a persona nor flanking supermodels—but retains its complex framework. Across 20 songs, he weaves intimate revelations about transition, sex, and grief into a three-part bilingual epic, incorporating Madonna on three tracks as the voice of an omniscient, artificially intelligent Eye.
Chris’ syllabus for Paranoïa, Angels, True Love centers on Angels in America, playwright Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning magnum opus, which follows a young man, Prior Walter, who is dying of AIDS in New York City in the late ’80s. Chris watched the 2003 miniseries adaptation of the play during the pandemic; he felt profoundly moved by its joyful ending, in which Prior refuses to bring about an apocalypse, begging instead for “more life.” “Subconsciously I picked that play because I wanted to manifest that for myself,” Chris confessed to Vulture.
He clearly sees the relevance of Kushner’s writing in this political moment. The expansive possibilities of gay life in the ’70s collapsed in the total ruin of the AIDS crisis; the Trans Tipping Point of the ’10s is a distant memory in our current discourse over puberty blockers, book bans, and Bud Light. Christine and the Queens’ early transmasculine anthems, like “iT” and “Girlfriend,” are irrepressible, carefree—diametric opposites of the tense depiction of trans life in Paranoïa, Angels, True Love. Chris wonders, in “He’s been shining for ever, your son,” if his mother is looking down from heaven, “for a daughter.” The break from romance and sex, for Chris as for Prior Walter, is fraught; lovers walk out or fail to satisfy. The human body is capable of betrayal, too. Prior hemorrhages blood and hides his Kaposi’s sarcoma beneath long sleeves. Chris, touching himself, is horrified to realize that “it’s all still there.” A heavenly body, by contrast, sounds terribly appealing.
But Chris does not organize these themes particularly well. He boasted about writing some of these songs in 20 minutes and recording all his vocals in single takes, immediately upon waking. Occasionally, there is a raw vulnerability to the delivery, the sleep audible in his voice. Sometimes, though, it means he simply doesn’t hit his notes. Frequently free-associating at the microphone, he lets several songs dissolve into wordless vocalization: either the echoing vowels of choirs in cathedrals or the sighs and half-formed words of lovers in bed. The sacred and profane, side by side, atop one another, always in excess.
With Mike Dean onboard as co-producer, the atmosphere is extravagant, too: enormous, full of echo, and fiercely neutral. Snare drums skitter. Synths hum low, darkly, in contrast to the high, angelic humming of choirs. The keys and guitars have a saw-toothed, industrial quality. When these elements collide on the 11-minute “Track 10,” you can almost see Chris back-lit on a bare stage, smoke rolling low around his feet—a rockstar moment, but bare and unadorned. When A.G. Cook briefly takes over, 17 tracks in, for part of “Lick the Light Out,” his production is so effusive, so glittering and joyous, that it makes Dean’s work seem incomplete by comparison.
For every stunner—the Marvin Gaye-sampling “Tears Can Be So Soft,” the curious and searching “I Met an Angel,” the dusky doo-wop of “True Love,” featuring 070 Shake—there is a head-scratcher. What are we to do with “Full of Life,” little more than Pachelbel’s Canon played to completion over an incongruous vocal track? Why does the sexual anarchy of “Let Me Touch You” and “Aimer, Puis Vivre” fizzle into something so dull and disorganized? Think of those cold, pale Roman marbles, stripped, over millennia, of their paint. Paranoïa, Angels, True Love is a hall of those statues—not all fully formed, and often crying out for color.
In The World Only Spins Forward, Isaac Butler and Dan Kois’ oral history of Angels in America, Kushner tells of the 10 sleepless days and nights in which he wrote 700 longhand pages of Perestroika, the play’s second half, in a spider-infested cabin on the Russian River. At its very best, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love captures this feverish lightning-in-a-bottle energy. But where Kushner’s many moving parts lock into place, spurring each other on toward a harrowing, rapturous climax, the songs of Chris’s album never quite cohere. Moments of clarity and craftsmanship are undercut by extended periods of improvisation. The reason Angels in America captivates audiences, despite its length and density, is that Kushner returned home from the Russian River, pulled out his red pen, and edited. Paranoïa, Angels, True Love still feels like a first draft.
Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified Mike Dean as a producer. He is a co-producer.


With cover songs and a couple of originals, this solo live performance captures the prolific Roxy Music leader in top form: the weirdo conduit for a generation’s teenage pop dreams.

Bryan Ferry: Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974

Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974

To be Bryan Ferry in 1974 was like being Bob Dylan in 1965, Clark Gable in 1939, and Oscar Wilde in 1895. He commanded his space, he bulldozed the rickety fence between sincerity and irony for a generation of acolytes, and his hair was fabulous. Running a parallel solo career while singer-songwriter-keyboardist for Roxy Music, Ferry released six albums in just two years. This solo live performance, recorded weeks after the release of Roxy’s fourth album Country Life and six months after his second covers collection Another Time, Another Place, captures Ferry and backing band in top form. No audible laryngitis here—Ferry’s vocal attack shakes the rafters. Expect improvisation and Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974 will disappoint. Novelty, though, it’s got—Ferry sounded like no singer in rock.
Leading the album with his cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” works as manifesto and adrenaline pumper. On 1973’s These Foolish Things, the song was fit for a Las Vegas floor show, stuffed with frantic brass and fruity backup vocals; the performance is a dissertation on finding the Mel Tormé in Mick Jagger. The Royal Albert Hall version applies a gutbucket rock approach, thanks to bassist John Wetton and drummer Paul Thompson. Always the art student, Ferry reveled in the contrast: the white tuxedo-clad dandy arching languorous quotation marks around the devil’s music. Yet he cared too. Over Eddie Jobson’s watery Fender Rhodes—one of the few concessions to the times—Ferry unleashes his most empathetic high notes on the first third of Another Time, Another Place’s self-written title track: a valentine to the records he grew up loving and whose rebellious spirit he’d honor by rewiring them.
But Ferry also possessed an actor’s instinct for understatement. Girl group and Motown hits moved him as much as the rock numbers. Although the live takes on the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me” and Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears” don’t differ much from his studio ones, their professions of vulnerability aren’t what audiences expected from white male rock singers. Most impressive is his insistence on keeping the feminine pronouns intact on Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party”; David Bowie may have proclaimed the Church of Man-Love a holy place to be, but Ferry’s identification with the desires of young women went beyond queerness into symbiosis; for the length of a 45 rpm single, Ferry and those female characters share a commonality.
Concluding with the title track of his first solo album, an English standard from the 1930s, Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974 captures an artist reclaiming an earlier era’s detritus as his own. Ferry opened his mouth and dozens of heirs spilled out, few with his knowledge of R&B and fewer with the wisdom to posit themselves as the essential secondhand man: a conduit for a generation’s teenage pop dreams. He revolutionized the pop song by remaking/remodeling it as Pop Art: a readymade comprised of avant-garde electronic stylings, effects-laden guitars, mournful oboes, and lyrics that embraced romantic obsession by mocking it. So much labor because he believed obsession deserves cool appraisal, too. Singing about foolish things meant he believed in them.


Ladytron follow the expansive, immediate Witching Hour with a record of more restrained goth-pop.

Velocifero

Not only was Witching Hour one of the better albums of 2005, it more or less saved Ladytron's career. For a group that sprang up right on time for the whole early-aughts electroclash morass to subsume them, the group's transformation to a subtly more melodic, pop-friendly, and emotionally expressive style made a lot of sense, both in terms of stylistic evolution and just plain old self-preservation. It's the same instinct that kept New Order and Depeche Mode going long after people stopped using the term "new wave" in earnest-- and even if there was still plenty of runway-walk detachment in their sound, the music made it feel perfectly human.
But there's another human impulse that keeps the follow-up Velocifero from hitting quite as hard, and that's the desire to stick with what works, especially if that formula took you to another level. There's not much wrong with that method where this album's concerned; substituting refinement and subtle expansion for constant evolution isn't that heinous a crime, and being big on Witching Hour will probably lead you to appreciate Velocifero in a more reserved way. There's no pinned-to-your-seat blowaways like "Destroy Everything You Touch" or "High Rise", a shortage of legitimately affecting ballads in the vein of "All the Way..." or "Beauty*2", and a severe dearth of the subtle levity that made Witching Hour an expansive record-- in other words, there's really not a lot of immediacy to Velocifero at all.
What this record does have is a solid number of goth-pop hookfests. Compared to the highlights of their previous records, the songs on Velocifero have more movement than actual force; the shuffle-glam "Ghosts" gets surprisingly little bass-range impact from such a heavy stomp, and the rapid synth-pop pulses on "I'm Not Scared" and "Season of Illusions" threaten to slip from a groove to a rut if you think of them strictly in terms of rhythm. (For a record with some input from Ed Banger electro-pop remix specialists Vicarious Bliss, that's kind of hard to imagine.)
But the vocals make up for that, and aside from the occasional lyrical clunker (from "Versus": "like a kitten versus rain"-- d'aww, sniffle), it's impressive how Helen Marnie and Mira Aroyo take empty-on-paper lyrics and give them meaning through sheer repetition. We've already heard more than enough about little runaways from Del Shannon (and, uh, Bon Jovi), but Marnie's singing in "Runaway" sweetly offsets the harsh snarl of Velocifero's hardest-hitting instrumental backing and turns a pop cliché ("Where you waking up today/ My little runaway") into a haunting refrain. The aforementioned "Ghosts" works because its enigmatic hook-- "There's a ghost in me/ Who wants to say I'm sorry/ Doesn't mean I'm sorry"-- is delivered with Marnie's note-perfect sing-song delivery, a simultaneously taunting and regretful voice which not only gives the words gravity but lends a good amount of weight to an otherwise flat-sounding song. And Mira Aroyo, relatively scarce on Witching Hour, has more opportunities to showcase her icy, sharp, often-foreboding voice, singing in her native Bulgarian with a sinister deadpan on "Black Cat" and a sleek, mellifluous energy on traditional folk song "Kletva"; in English her raspy purr turns the circa-1990 techno-pop of "Deep Blue" into a seething come-on.
Writers and fans like to talk about how wintry and cold Ladytron's music is, which might be the album's real shortcoming; maybe it'll sound a bit more appropriate five or six months after its June release when its isolated iciness has a suitable environmental backdrop. But even with a somewhat diminished speaker-filling capability and a couple of songs that seem to have less actual energy than they should, Velocifero's subtlety will eventually reward further listens. Not everything has to be an exclamation point or a CGI explosion, and even if Ladytron excel in big, instant-grab attention-getting pop maneuvers, the dearth of them here only means that they've got a good venue to prove they can get by OK on restraint.


The duo’s collaborative mixtape isn’t a complete disaster, and it’s nice to hear Lil Wayne rap adequately again.

Lil Wayne / Rich the Kid: Trust Fund Babies

Trust Fund Babies

Rich the Kid is always in the right place at the right time. Back in 2012, he was introduced to Migos in a club, and they hit it off. By the following year, the Atlanta trio would be the first signees of Quality Control, have a hit single (“Versace”)—which grew so big that Drake hopped on the remix—and they’d drop one of the most definitive Southern rap mixtapes of the 2010s (Y.R.N.). Through all this, Rich tagged along, becoming their unofficial fourth member through two collaborative mixtapes, which weren’t that good—but the timing was perfect. Again and again, Rich would be in proximity to rappers who were much more interesting than he was at the ideal moment: Kodak Black and Playboi Carti right before they became household names; Famous Dex and Jay Critch around the time of the overlooked group mixtape Rich Forever 3; YoungBoy Never Broke Again when Rich somehow convinced YB to do a joint mixtape. I suppose Rich deserves credit for his ability to spot talent, but he’s been able to survive in rap through sheer persistence and networking.
His latest venture is Trust Fund Babies, a collaborative mixtape with Lil Wayne; and of course, given Rich’s combination of dumb luck and business savvy, it arrives amid a so-called Wayne renaissance. Oh, you haven’t heard? Lil Wayne is apparently back and rejuvenated. The evidence for this is a run of features over the past year or so, though despite streaks of brilliance—his nerding out for The Firm on AZ’s Doe or Die II, or the hunger in his raps on Tyler the Creator’s “Hot Wind Blows”—it’s too inconsistent for me to call it a resurgence.
That pretty much holds true on Trust Fund Babies, which seems to exist for the sole reason that Rich grew up on Wayne, and Wayne thought Rich had good vibes. (A more cynical guess would be that Rich rang Wayne’s doorbell and presented him with a hefty duffel bag.) But whatever the motives behind the tape, it’s bizarre that it’s not a ton of fun, given such low stakes. Take the unbearably dry “Yeah Yeah.” It’s cool that Wayne is horny, but if he’s going to be horny, it should be more descriptive than “She just wanna give me some sloppy, yeah/She just wanna lick on my lolly, yeah.” (Gross me out!) On “Shh,” he clocks in a verse so dull, you can’t even single out a line that’s so bad it’s good. He shows signs of life on “Headlock,” but his puns aren’t clever enough to justify the a capella intro.
So much of the space here is filled with Rich hooks and verses that could have easily been recycled and no one would know it. He continues to have no identity of his own, switching between that tired triplet flow and a lazy Young Thug impersonation throughout (most egregiously on the chorus of “Feelin’ Like Tunechi”). If Thug sued me for associating him with this mess, I would understand!
The only reason to care about this mixtape is Wayne, even if it often sounds like he’s being held captive in a studio by Rich and has to rap his way out. “Buzzin’” is a highlight, with some dizzying classic Wayne wordplay and a graphic sex punchline that gets funnier the more you think about it: “She give me brain, that’s skully/She drunk a Wayne McFlurry.” And “Big Boss” has one of the mixtape’s few tolerable Rich the Kid verses. Wayne shines on the spacey production with familiar yet witty punchlines. But the truth is the bar is low. After years of health scares, label issues, and the depressingly awful raps between I Am Not a Human Being II and Free Weezy Album, it’s just nice to hear Wayne rap adequately again. It may not be a comeback, or a return to his glory days, or whatever other overstatement you’ll come across, but it’s fine enough that this half-assed business deal with Rich the Kid isn’t a complete disaster.

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The first example of the late musician's instrumental work to be unearthed on Audika features some of the most gorgeous, populist sounds from New York's late-70s avant-garde.

Arthur Russell: First Thought, Best Thought

First Thought, Best Thought

The late Arthur Russell's reputation still largely rests on his work as a producer of disco singles in the late 1970s and early 80s. There's nothing wrong with that. Russell rewrote disco in handwriting so fluid and personal that his stature would be assured even if that were all ever he did. But of course it wasn't. I think with time Russell's lyrical work-- one hesitates to use the phrase "singer-songwriter"-- will only grow in stature, until it stands alongside his disco records in listeners' minds. But before his famed visit to Nicky Siano's Gallery club, and just before he formed his country (not country) band the Flying Hearts, Russell was on a modern composer's track, performing his (for the sake of ease, let's call it) minimalist music at downtown New York venues like the Kitchen.
First Thought, Best Thought is the first example of Russell's instrumental work to be reissued by Audika Records, whose Steve Knutson has taken up the challenge of sorting through hundreds of hours of unreleased tapes. Like Audika's other Russell reissues, it features gorgeous sleeve design-- including a heartbreaking portrait of a forlorn-looking Russell, eyes sunken in shadow and cheeks mottled with acne scars-- and liner notes from Russell and the musicians he worked with at the time, in this case Ernie Brooks of the Modern Lovers. Unlike the other reissues, it features music that is both more and less compelling than the Russell listeners have come to know.
The first disc contains the two-part "Instrumentals", which was planned to be a 48-hour continuous performance but was only ever played live in bits and pieces. The previously unreleased "Instrumentals Volume One" is a masterpiece, up there with "In the Light of the Miracle" and World of Echo as Russell's greatest achievements. It melts the bustle of urbanity into the ebb and flow of a Midwestern lake. (Russell was obsessed with bodies of water growing up in Iowa, the way only a landlocked boy can be.) Minimalist only in its repetition, which weaves more than it cycles, "Instrumentals Volume One" is not what immediately springs to mind when you think of experimental music from the 1970s. It's beautiful, for one thing. And it sounds like it was made by someone who switched the radio on every now and again. In it, you can hear the gentle lope, twanging guitar ostinatos, and sweeping strings of 70s soul, the crosstown yearning of someone like Bobby Womack. You can also hear the ghosts of Ives, Copeland, and all the American composers who located the soul of the country in the fields, the canyons, and the frontier spaces. Russell wanted to gently dissolve the distinctions between high and low, catching hell for bringing the specter of popular music into New York's avant-garde. But he also dissolved geography. The space across 110th Street became as wide as a wheat field.
"Instrumentals Volume 1" is worth the price of First Thought, Best Thought all on its own. Nothing else on these two discs is quite so beguiling, but the other pieces continue to reveal other sides of Arthur Russell. "Instrumentals Volume 2" flows out from "Volume 1", slowly stripping away the drums until the instruments melt into each other like the wax of multi-colored candles collecting in a pool. "Reach One" is a very early composition from 1973 which plays two Fender Rhodes electric pianos off each other with meandering results. (It's not necessarily an insult to call this juvenilia.) "Tower of Meaning", on the other hand, is an orchestral work of great refinement that cycles through slow, deliberate, not unpretty chords. It's the most traditionally classical piece on First Thought, though as always with Russell words like "traditional" and "classical" are relative terms. The set is rounded out by "Sketch for the Face of Helen", a rumbling bit of oily musique concrète that features a bleating tugboat.
Audika's reissue program is an act of devoted, some might say obsessive, scholarship and curatorship that deserves every bit of acclaim it's received. Five years ago, the availability of Russell's work was limited to a handful of songs on the first Disco (Not Disco) compilation. With the unearthing of material that never left Russell's apartment and the careful repackaging of records out-of-print for years, it now encompasses a broader view of Russell's genius than even those there at the time could have known. The most amazing thing of all is that a huge iceberg of still-unreleased music lurks under the receding, placid waters of Russell's anonymity. Give Steve Knutson a knighthood or something already.


The songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who’s collaborated with Big Thief, the Deslondes, and the Low Anthem returns with a sparse, earnest collection that occasionally overstates its message.

Noon

At the end of “Noon,” the first song on Twain’s new album of the same name, Matthew Davidson makes a promise to someone long departed: “I will not forget,” he sings over a simple piano theme and a volley of solemn cymbal crashes. It’s not the words that hit so hard, but the way he delivers them, in particular the way he delivers that last one. He holds that final note for way too long, sustaining that vowel until his voice quivers and feathers into the air. It sounds unplanned, a spontaneous decision, an act of intuition that gestures toward a bittersweet realization: Simply not forgetting will not be enough to keep that person in his life. That long note also reminds you that there’s a physical body singing the airy songs on Noon. For better or for worse, the music might just float away if he didn’t tether it.
A music industry equivalent of a character actor, Davidson is one of those veteran musicians whose work you’ve heard even if you missed out on Twain’s 2017 breakthrough, Rare Feeling, or any of his solo releases since. In the late 2000s he joined the Low Anthem and helped them expand their scope and palette; more recently, he has been playing fiddle with the Deslondes and working with Big Thief, even contributing to their recent double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. Twain is his leading role, an opportunity to step toward the front of the stage. Especially for a multi-instrumentalist credited with guitar, keys, and pedal steel on such a wide variety of projects, there’s something startling about the restraint he shows on Noon. He keeps the arrangements light, sparse yet spry, and he jettisons the electric guitar and drums of Rare Feeling for a sound that mixes acoustic guitar with soft percussion and flourishes of piano and reeds.
Far and away the most prominent instrument, however, is his voice: a high, slightly nasal sound just shy of a croak, recalling the mannerisms of Andrew Bird or any of the freak-folkies of the 2000s. Davidson has a tendency to rush into a melody and to worry over a phrase until it becomes a mantra. This approach conveys a quiet excitement: utter commitment to whatever he’s singing about. He’s unceasingly, unrelentingly earnest on Noon, without the wryness or humor you might expect from someone who describes their album as a “self-caricature of the musician and writer Matthew Davidson.” That tone can be limiting, but it does highlight his knack for investing mundane situations with deep meaning, whether he’s sharing a joint with a cook (“2 Lovers”) or driving his tour van into the sunrise (“The Priestess”).
Just as Davidson can make you think catching up with an old friend is a sublime experience, he can indulge lofty philosophical ideas that overstate his message. Lines like “Beauty is wanting to be what you really are” suffocate every other sentiment and crowd out all nuance, all without sounding particularly profound. Noon becomes especially cumbersome when he tries to address current political concerns. “Please don’t let them outlaw silence,” he begs on “Vitality,” which sounds like a social media post rendered in florid language: “That is where peace likes to grow.” You can agree with him on every issue and still think “King of Fools” is far too obvious a polemic. “I see a couple children fighting over toys/How long must they die and die and die to satisfy the king of fools?” Won’t somebody please think of the children?
The album title refers to the lowest point in the pendulum swing, a midpoint in a cycle of reaction and action, questioning and understanding. It’s an intriguing idea, but too often Davidson sounds like he is singing from a place of enlightenment, where he can see everything—his past and our present—with perfect clarity. There’s no sense of him figuring things out, which deflates so much of this ambitious album. Enlightenment is never as compelling as the rocky road to get there.