To mark their 30th anniversary, the Charlatans continue the unbroken streak of good-not-great albums they’ve released since 1997—this time with guests like Paul Weller and Johnny Marr.

Different Days

For good and for ill, the Charlatans have been one of the most consistent British pop bands around since their inception in 1989. Of all the bands that emerged from the Madchester/baggy scene—those appropriately loose genre descriptors for acts that aimed to connect 1960s pop and psychedelia with the pulse and energy of acid house—this West Midlands group hasn’t played the long-hiatus-then-reunion game that nearly all of their contemporaries did. They’ve instead stayed the course, releasing a new album every few years that dutifully land in the top half of the UK charts. As the Charlatans approach their 30th birthday as a group, they’ve arrived at elder statesmen status, and it’s allowed them to call on famous fans and friends like novelist Ian Rankin, actor Sharon Horgan, Paul Weller, and Johnny Marr to contribute to the cause of their 13th studio album Different Days.
But like many bands of their age and ilk, that consistency has been to the Charlatans’ creative detriment. Unlike many of their peers, such as Blur or James, the group has been slow to evolve beyond the agreeable, danceable sound of their 1990 debut Some Friendly. They’ve dressed it up at times with front-facing guitars (their 1995 self-titled album), a touch of Dylanesque rumination (2004’s Up At the Lake), and charmingly wobbly reggae experiments (2006’s Simpatico), but the skeleton remains the same. On Different Days, the only elements that feel out of the ordinary are the interesting but unnecessary spoken word interludes by Rankin and Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner. Everything else pretty much stays the course.
For longtime followers of the group, that is surely a source of comfort. You know exactly what you’re going to get with a new Charlatans album. The fun then becomes listening for those ways in which they slightly tweak the formula. For Different Days, it’s all about what their many guests brought to the table.
As ever, Marr leaves the most refreshing mark on these songs, with his recognizable guitar melding into the Stones-ian groove of “Not Forgotten” and the utterly delightful title track. He also helps provide added ballast on “Plastic Machinery” so Brian Jonestown Massacre leader Anton Newcombe can fly free on his buzzing guitar line. New Order members Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris evoke the title of “The Same House” by adding rave-ready rhythm tracks to this charming but repetitive number. And Weller coaxes a nice smooth 1970s R&B feel out of the band with gruff contributions of piano, percussion, and vocals to the album closer “Spinning Out,” which he also co-wrote.
All of those augmentations simply aren’t enough to elevate Different Days beyond the Charlatans’ unbroken streak of good-not-great albums that they’ve released since their creative high point of 1997’s Tellin’ Stories. The majority of the songs here are plenty engaging with some rising above the fray. The title track showcases the group’s ability to play with and against a programmed beat—in this case, a jaunty music box melody that rattles beneath the song’s pleasant midtempo ramble. And the jangly “Let’s Go Together” is one of the kindest love songs that singer/bandleader Tim Burgess has written to date (“If I succeed in being in your dreams/I will unwind, I’ll be easy to find”) aided by some swimmy tones created by keyboardist Tony Rodgers.
Again, that’s been the mark of a Charlatans album for the past 20 years: a couple of cracking singles surrounded by a bunch of thoughtful, forgettable tunes. It gets doubly frustrating when looking at the varied work that Burgess has done outside of the group, including his Mark Nevers-produced, Nashville-recorded solo album Oh No I Love You and his wonderful electronic pop collaboration with composer Peter Gordon (last year’s Same Language, Different Worlds). Asking his band to change course in a dramatic fashion after nearly three decades together might be too much. But allowing themselves to get away from the tried and true could give the Charlatans a nice creative jolt to keep them going for another 30 years.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Fiona Apple’s second album, full of diamond-sharp writing that mines the depths of her psyche and emotion.

When the Pawn...

Fiona Apple started writing in order to more effectively argue with her parents. As a kid who’d been identified as troubled and sent to therapy, she struggled to make authority figures see her side of conflicts. “So I’d go back into my room and I would write a letter and an hour later, I’d come out and read it—‘This is how I feel’—and I’d go back into my room,” Apple recalled in a 1999 Washington Post interview. “I would love the way that it felt to have your side of an argument right here in front of you. If I wrote a letter, I didn’t even need to win an argument.”
In this, as in so much else, she was precocious. Great art has been motivated by that same impulse to correct the record—to impress a divergent worldview on those who’d prefer to ignore it, whether that audience numbers two or, in the case of Apple’s first album, 1996’s Tidal, three million. That remarkable debut contained rejoinders to a fickle lover, a rapist, and anyone foolish enough to write off Apple because she happened to be young or small or female. As a hip-hop fan, Apple understood the power of a boast. In its bluntness, Tidal also functioned as a preemptive act of self-defense from a person already accustomed to being misunderstood.
A legion of new fans, many of them girls younger than Apple (who was 18 at the time of the album’s release), understood her messages of individualism and resilience instinctually. But her candor didn’t exactly prevent the press or the public from judging her harshly; though her notorious “this world is bullshit” speech at the 1997 VMAs constituted a cannier analysis of celebrity culture than most people in the entertainment industry wanted to admit, its messiness suggested that she was still a more eloquent writer than speaker. By the time she started composing her second album, Apple had a reputation—as a bitch, a brat, a heroin-chic waif and possible anorexic, a performer who, according to The New York Times, “plays a Lolita-ish suburban party girl” on TV but comes on more like a “shrinking violet” in concert. It was hers to shake off, or at least to reshape on her own terms.
Although When The Pawn is, on its surface, a suite of 10 songs that dissect embattled loves and unhealthy desires, demonstrating the impossibility of maintaining romantic relationships when you’re always at war with yourself, the “you” to whom Apple addresses so many of her lyrics isn’t necessarily singular. Female singer-songwriters are generally presumed to be memoirists, but Apple has always maintained that the songs on this record were composed without any specific, personal incidents in mind. Often, she could just as plausibly be speaking to a derisive, judgmental public.
The first clue that she was looking outward as well as inward is in the 90-word poem she chose as the album’s title:

When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He’ll Win the Whole Thing ’Fore He Enters the Ring There’s No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand Then You Know Where to Land and If You Fall It Won’t Matter Cuz You’ll Know That You’re Right

Dismissed at the time as a meaningless ploy for attention, the poem is in fact pretty legible (despite the mixed sports metaphors) as a pep talk to a vulnerable person who’s gearing up to defend their unpopular truth in public—and, inevitably, get pilloried for it. Apple composed it on tour, after paging through reader responses to a 1997 Spin cover story, with photos by Terry Richardson and slobbery physical descriptions to match, that had painted her as a pretentious, melodramatic pill. “I had just sat on the bus and there’s Spin with Bjork on the cover and I picked it up and there were all these terrible letters in reaction to my story—‘She’s the most annoying thing in the world, etc,’” she recounted in the Post profile. “And I got so upset, I was crying, and I didn’t know how to make myself go on, make myself feel like it was all going to be OK.”
But she did go on, by pushing back against her public image with blunt self-analysis. Released on November 9, 1999, When the Pawn isn’t a carefully constructed self-portrait so much as an aura-photo that captured a snarled psyche untangling itself with a fine-tooth comb. The narrator’s mistrust of happiness threatens an all-consuming romance in opener “On the Bound.” On “A Mistake,” over cymbals and synthetic boops that suggest an emergency without resorting to siren samples, Apple’s voice builds urgency as she confesses, “I’ve acquired quite a taste/For a well-made mistake/I wanna make a mistake/Why can’t I make a mistake?” Yet what begins as self-destructive rock cliché transforms into a lament about the not-exactly-punk qualities of conscientiousness and perfectionism: “I’m always doing what I think I should/Almost always doing everybody good/Why?”
In place of the bravado of Tidal’s “Sleep to Dream” and “Never Is a Promise,” there is Apple’s keen understanding of the effects her intensity can have on others. And it doesn’t seem like a fluke that this theme is most pronounced on the singles. A jittery, syncopated sprint that plays up the nimbleness of her smoky alto, “Fast as You Can” famously taunts, “You think you know how crazy/How crazy I am.” It doubles as both a warning to a lover and a reclamation of a slur that had followed Apple throughout the publicity cycle surrounding her debut—one that has been used to dismiss willful female artists since the beginning of time. Years before pop culture got serious about authentically depicting mental illness, the song likens her inner struggles to sharing a body with a beast that could never be defeated or appeased, characterizing that fight as a process of “blooming within.” (In 2012, Apple began speaking publicly about her experiences with OCD.)
“I went crazy again today,” she sings in “Paper Bag,” the Grammy-nominated single that may be the most fondly remembered track on When the Pawn. It’s Broadway meets the Beatles in its triumphal horn blasts, but as the melody grows ever bouncier, the words increasingly counter that levity with disappointment. The lyric starts out all stars and daydreams and doves of hope, before dispelling those pop song illusions to reveal the grim reality that the man Apple desires sees her as “a mess he don’t wanna clean up.” She’s never had trouble laughing at herself, and “Paper Bag” hinges on a sly reference to her own solipsism—“He said ‘It’s all in your head’/And I said ‘So’s everything’/But he didn’t get it”—that drags the singer and an uncomprehending public at once.
The song is emblematic of an album that broadened Apple’s fragile, mercurial image not just with self-awareness, but also by expanding her sound beyond the jazzy, beat-backed piano ballads of Tidal. When the Pawn’s producer Jon Brion (whose baroque arrangements had recently created context for the dateless, scene-less voices of Rufus Wainwright and Aimee Mann) intuited that her style was distinctive enough to absorb other elements without losing cohesion. Still, even in his own estimation, he tends to get an outsized share of the credit for the record’s innovations. In a conversation with Performing Songwriter, Brion clarified that its unusual rhythms—namely, the time-signature shifts in “Fast as You Can”—originated with Apple’s songwriting. “In terms of the color changes, I am coordinating all of those,” he said. “But the rhythms are absolutely Fiona’s.”
It was, in fact, Apple who dictated that division of labor. Brion recalled her beginning their collaboration by playing an almost fully realized When the Pawn on the piano, then telling him plainly: “I write pretty well, I’m a good singer, and I can play my songs well enough on piano. You’re good at everything else. So I think that’s how we should proceed, and if we are ever off-base, I’ll let you know." With that in mind, he recorded her vocals and piano first, sometimes simultaneously, then added other instruments with help from a deep, impressive roster of professional session musicians. Despite mixing diverse sounds and styles, Brion’s arrangements cohered, giving the album a darkly romantic texture that overrode the clichés of any one genre.
The results could have overwhelmed Apple’s songs, like collages pasted over pencil sketches, but Brion favored fine detail work over heavy-handed flourishes. The big kiss-off, “Get Gone,” pivots between enervated verses where sparse piano meets a brushed snare and defiant choruses that intensify Apple’s barroom keys with Douglas Sirk strings punctuating each acerbic vocal line with a bell. A groaning electric piano in the outro of “To Your Love” cuts through the prettiness of the song’s rhyming couplets, injecting some emotional complexity. Sandwiched between two of the album’s most daring tracks, “Paper Bag” and the delirium of “Limp,” is “Love Ridden,” a tender track in the Tidal mold where Brion’s string section merely shades in some negative space around Apple’s voice and piano.
When the Pawn was, if anything, more frank in its descriptions of physical intimacy than Tidal had been. Yet the later album avoided exploiting Apple’s sex appeal in quite the same mode as that first album’s witty and widely misunderstood song “Criminal,” whose seductive slink and infamous video nonetheless resembled innuendo-laden ’90s teen pop more than anything she’s put out since. Apple’s new approach to sexuality was aggressive to the point of being fearsome. “I’m not turned on/So put away that meat you’re selling,” she growled in “Get Gone.” The frenzied chorus of “Limp” evoked gaslighting, sexual assault, and the public’s predatory voyeurism at once: “Call me crazy, hold me down/Make me cry; get off now, baby/It won’t be long till you’ll be lying limp in your own hands.”
With the leverage of an artist whose first album had gone triple platinum—and a brilliant collaborator in her boyfriend at the time, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson—Apple also exerted control over the way she presented herself in music videos. A production number that had her dancing with besuited boys in a goofy reverie, Anderson’s clip for “Paper Bag” struck a blow against her morose reputation. In “Fast as You Can,” she wipes a foggy window until the camera can see her clearly. Most striking, “Limp” situated her in a home as dark as the one in “Criminal”; she puts together a self-portrait puzzle but fails to locate the piece that would complete a word scrawled on it: “angry.” In the final seconds, she stares down the camera as she spits out, “I never did anything to you, man/But no matter what I try, you’ll beat me with your bitter lies.” Every video in this series challenged the way viewers thought of Apple; “Limp” went farthest, implicating everyone outside the frame who would attack a well-intentioned stranger for sport.
Some of these sadists were critics, of course. And they didn’t all see that Apple deserved to be excluded from this baby-vamp-slash-harpy narrative they’d invented for her. Even positive appraisals of When the Pawn (which predominated) made sure to get in a few shots. “Apple’s public persona has done her more damage than any mean-spirited journalist could ever hope to inflict,” wrote Joshua Klein in the A.V. Club. “At 22, she’s already more insufferable than Courtney Love, a fact that often threatens to overshadow her compelling music.” Jokes about the title were all but required in these pieces. Eric Weisbard at Spin may have hit on what was behind the negs from other male critics who knew the record was good when he noted, “The album, and I say this with appreciation, is a real ball-breaker.”
If it didn’t quite boost Apple’s image among listeners who weren’t already fans, at least When the Pawn emerged at a time when her music could speak for itself. Tidal had appeared in a year when Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill spent 10 weeks at No. 1, despite having been released in June of 1995. With No Doubt, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Natalie Merchant, Sophie B. Hawkins, Melissa Etheridge, Merril Bainbridge and Joan Osborne all on the Hot 100, it was Women in Rock season. The cover story that hurt Apple so much appeared in Spin’s November 1997 “Girl Issue,” not long after she toured with the inaugural Lilith Fair. The “angry woman” trend that had enabled her stardom meant constant comparisons to Alanis (another pissed-off young woman) and Tori Amos (another female pianist with a song about her rape).
By 1999—a year dominated by rap-rock, teen pop, Smash Mouth, and Santana’s Supernatural—her singularity was apparent. (So devoid of Apple analogs was the pop landscape at the time that author and Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield allowed himself a rare overreach: “In a way, Apple’s music is a spiritual sister to the angst-ridden rap-metal of Korn and Limp Bizkit.”) In retrospect, her real peers were artists like Erykah Badu, the Magnetic Fields, Lauryn Hill, and Cornershop, unclassifiable songwriters who blended old and new styles into something timeless. As Entertainment Weekly framed it in their When The Pawn review, “the seemingly nonstop blur of young acts swamping the charts and MTV’s ‘Total Request Live’ does make one occasionally yearn for performers with—how to put it delicately?—longevity and substance.”
It would take two more stunning sui generis albums (2005’s Extraordinary Machine and 2012’s The Idler Wheel…) to usher in the rise of pop feminism, and a more open, informed public conversation about mental health to convince the wider world of what sad teen girls had known since 1996: that Fiona Apple is far from crazy. But When The Pawn was so good it forced her detractors to take her seriously anyway, earning their grudging acclaim and launching the opening salvo in a fight she’d ultimately win. “What I need is a good defense,” Apple had pleaded on “Criminal.” Three years later, she’d become her own best advocate.


Joan of Arc’s latest troll manifesto offers a nasty reminder of Tim Kinsella’s ability to ruffle feathers, playing up one of his most off-putting qualities: his humor.

Joan of Arc: He's Got the Whole This Land Is Your Land in His Hands

“We’ve never had an audience that gets any validation of its coolness through liking us,” Tim Kinsella writes of Joan of Arc. That’s putting it delicately. For a good stretch of their two decade run, Joan of Arc were the most hated act in emo, unpopular with listeners, critics, and at times seemingly their own record label. Revisiting reviews of their old albums is a crash course in just how vicious music criticism could be around the turn of the century. The group attracted that special kind of vitriol reserved not for bands that piss people off but for those that seem to be trying to piss people off; especially for fans of Kinsella’s previous band Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc’s low-passion art-rock seemed like a personal insult. Few of Kinsella’s peers seemed to relish destroying the trust they’d cultivated with their fans quite so much.
At some point—probably around 2000’s The Gap, certainly by 2003’s In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust—Kinsella began to own the fact that the average listener despised this group. With its unsteady lineup and blurry genre focus, the group had never really operated with clear parameters anyway, so Joan of Arc became the default outlet for Kinsella’s most contentious ideas. On paper, there’s a certain logic to that: When people have no expectations for your band, you’re free to do just about anything, and to go to uncomfortable places a band with a reputation to preserve might steer clear of. That’s on paper, though. In practice, Joan of Arc never had all that much great music to show for their scorched-earth approach.
Kinsella has downplayed some of his more disagreeable instincts on his recent records, most prominently on the crowd-pleasing sophomore album from his Owls project. But he also made a broader appeal on Joan of Arc’s 2011 offering Life Like, a satisfyingly straightforward rock record a lot more listeners might have given a chance if it hadn’t come out under the Joan of Arc moniker. Lest anybody get the impression that Kinsella has begun to seek approval with age, though, Joan of Arc’s latest troll manifesto He’s Got the Whole This Land Is Your Land in His Hands offers a nasty reminder of Kinsella’s ability to ruffle feathers by playing up one of his most off-putting qualities: his humor. It plays like Kinsella’s belated answer to the smirking whimsy-pop of the Unicorns, but without the inclusive spirit, and it may be the most overtly irritating thing he’s ever done. He’s Got the Whole is an album designed to test the limits of your nerves from its sing-songy very first line: “What the faaaaaahhhhh-uuuuuuuck?”
And so the silliness commences. “Pizza and cunnilingus both give me heartburn,” Kinsella snickers over some seasick electro-clash on “This Must Be the Placenta.” Elsewhere he pledges to “kill the little Hitler in my heart” on “Stranged That Egg Yolk” and milks a jingle-like chorus out of the rhyme “I know how the nicest guy in ISIS feels” on “New Wave Hippies,” before unloading any surplus zingers in an MC Paul Barman-esque word spray on “Ta-Ta Terrordome.” Throughout it all, he’s accompanied in tunelessness by singing guitarist Melina Ausikaitis, who cheers him on with off-kilter injections and takes a couple of eccentric lead turns on “Two-Toothed Troll” and “Never Wintersbone You,” the latter of which begins with some beat poetry about Phil Collins.
Ausikaitis brings a weird energy to the record, and, really, just the mere presence of any energy at all is enough to distinguish it from most Joan of Arc albums. But lack of energy has never been Joan of Arc’s biggest fault. You can write off the band’s aimless drone or meek art-rock experiments of the past as an acquired taste. The more glaring problem has always been Kinsella himself, and the satisfaction he seems to take from refusing to let the listener in on his jokes. He’s Got the Whole is presented as good fun, but it’s only fun in a one-sided, “why are you hitting yourself?” sort of way. It’s an album that seems to exist primarily to be disliked, and it couldn’t seem prouder of itself for achieving that sad goal. Credit Joan of Arc for this, though: 20 years in, they’re still finding new ways to alienate and infuriate.


The third volume of Hyperdub's 10th anniversary compilation series focuses on the ambient, minimalist, and experimental side that artists like Laurel Halo, Inga Copeland, and Dean Blunt have successfully tapped into. Yet given the artistic depth of those names and their precursors—most notably Burial, the Bug, and label head Kode9 himself—it's strange that this volume of Hyperdub's 10th anniversary series is the hardest yet to love.

Hyperdub 10.3

It's illuminating to compare Hyperdub's 2009 anniversary comp, 5: Five Years of Hyperdub, with the staggered-release phases of their 10th anniversary series five years later. The half-decade anniversary collection depicted a tight-knit yet adventurous label that took the dubstep-informed foundation of Steven Goodman, aka Kode9, and built it out in every direction that the structure could feasibly hold. Five years later, the label's roster and house style has expanded: 10.1 put forth a label canon that gave footwork, funky, and grime as much attention as the dubstep sound that put Hyperdub on the map, while 10.2 made a cohesive case for UK bass music's incorporation of straight-up R&B.
So it stands to reason that the third volume focuses on another facet entirely, centered as it is around the ambient, minimalist, and experimental side that artists like Laurel Halo, Inga Copeland, and Dean Blunt have successfully tapped into. Yet given the artistic depth of those names and their precursors—most notably Burial, the Bug, and Kode9 himself—it's strange that this volume of Hyperdub's 10th anniversary series is the hardest yet to love. The label's strong history with ambient and left-field music is underrated in the context of their greater role in transforming 2-step, but those experimental tendencies were always in the music, sometimes subsumed but always within reach. With the songs collected here, however, the sum of those efforts seems a bit bewildering: oddly beautiful one moment, disorienting and grating the next, and usually throbbing with some queasy undercurrent of dread that makes it hard to piece together.
The biggest sign that something's off is a deceptively simple fact: there are 23 tracks rolled out over the course of 74 minutes, and twelve of those tracks are an intermission-length two-and-a-half minutes or less. That in itself isn't a dealbreaker when it comes to ambient music—anyone who owns Brian Eno's Music for Films can vouch for that—but this collection of wide-ranging artists, featuring a number of tracks pulled from the context of pre-existing albums, represents Hyperdub's leftfield side with brief and sketched-out pieces (sometimes completely uncharacteristic ones, to boot) that don't go a long way to leave distinct impressions.
The more familiar of those earlier tracks, like Burial's "In McDonalds" and "Night Bus", Darkstar's "Ostkreuz", or Kode9 & the Spaceape's "Hole in the Sky", might stir up fond memories. But they're jumbled up and juxtaposed with so many like-minded songs riding on truncated buildups, foggy atmospherics, and beatless drones that the cumulative effect is a shivering blur. It's best to take things piece by piece, then, before reassembling again. Among the briefer selections from earlier albums, Ikonika's Aerotropolis deep cut "Completion" finds a new lease on life and outdoes its peers by building smartly over its abbreviated space, wrapping cresting oscillations around a simple, piercing three-note refrain. Cooly G deserves the entry-point nod for the yearning "Trying", a cut that draws the more intimate side of her already tactile sound even more forward-thinking, while still featuring a rich bass-ride ambience that keeps the rhythm up front even when the sparse drums drop out.
But the new cuts demand the most attention, especially since they reveal just how wide that ambient influence has spread throughout the label. Inga Copeland's freezer-burnt "I Am Your Ambient Wife" rests on the other side of the scale from Cooly G's warmth, never quite resolving into shape but pulling off the sonic equivalent of simultaneously melting and crumbling. Most other tracks hit some fascinating, if occasionally impenetrable, points in between sparse beauty and anxious cacophony; Kevin Martin's double duty as the Bug ("Siren") and King Midas Sound ("Blue") reveal that his ruffneck and introspective sides share an ear for calmly drifting chords and the tendency to push bass until it's thick enough to wrap around yourself. Lee Gamble's "DSM" drifts through a simple wave of minimalist melody and canyon-reverbed wooden blocks, a calm lull that makes its last-minute bass tremors feel like an ambush; Dean Blunt's "Urban" is a moody juxtaposition of a restlessly pacing synth riff and a fragile sax solo that threatens to fall apart just before emerging with the prettiest moment on the whole compilation.
Aside from "Blue", all those compositions are of a more substantial length, which is a good thing; the more space the artists have to work within, the better the end result, even when it's the type of fare that vast majority of people who were into into the beat-focused 10.1 and song-driven 10.2 might recoil from. Not every track features quick brushes against ambient, and there's a lot to work with in the album's two longest cuts: the day-glo chrome cyberpunk ascent of "Liloos Seduction", from King Britt's 2012 12" as Fhloston Paradigm, Chasing Rainbows, and Jeremy Greenspan's previously-unreleased pure wall-of-analog nightmare drone "Gage". Back in July, Kode9 declared on Twitter that "10.3 will be the soundtrack to slitting your wrists in a warm bath of champagne," which accurately sums up the atmosphere of bloodstained elegance that turns a lavish scene gruesome.


The New York producer’s second album is a dense and dizzying suite of collages that invites close listening.

Excelsior

Excelsior is Jasper Marsalis’ first album under the moniker Slauson Malone 1, but it’s his second solo album since leaving the Brooklyn-based collective Standing on the Corner. Where that group fashioned their tastes in jazz, lo-fi indie, and soul-sampling hip-hop into genre-spanning mixtapes and beats for Earl Sweatshirt and Solange, Marsalis is more interested in layering dissonant sounds on top of one another for dense collages. And so Excelsior is ambitious: Marsalis accompanies himself with nearly two dozen different instruments, from guitar to theremin, from Mellotron to Wurlitzer; the genre experiments combine grungy no-wave, free jazz, chamber music, and more. The results are always unpredictable and occasionally sublime.
Album opener “The Weather” crackles to life like the opening synths of a film score, recorded straight to tape. Marsalis’ syrupy vocals rise and exit with the thump of a piano before the tape loops and the whole process begins again. Those fuzzy, moody compositions will sound familiar to anyone who listened to Marsalis’ previous album, 2019’s A Quiet Farwell, 2016–2018 (Crater Speak). But where that record was a quiet landscape with occasional cracks of thunder, Excelsior fills every corner with words and sound. Some of the strongest moments come when he shares the stage with collaborators who rein in the wilder tastes. On “Decades, Castle Romeo,” cellist Nicky Wetherell provides baroque accompaniment to Marsalis’ guitar work that flows between dreamy strumming and dissonant psych rock. Later, “Us (Tower of Love)” puts Wetherell front and center, creating an affecting piece of modern classical composition to support Marsalis’ modulated vocals.
Marsalis plays with this type of tension throughout the album. “I Hear a New World” begins like a noise rock interpretation of police sirens before resolving into the lull of a harpsichord. “Half-Life” sounds as much like Sonic Youth as it does like a Jeff Parker guitar suite, while the sleepily intimate “Voyager” could as easily be a bedroom-pop B-side or the instrumental for an experimentally-inclined rapper like MIKE. Even “No! (Geiger Dub),” one of the most straightforward tracks, begins with a reggae bassline before Marsalis pairs it with an indie folk vocal that eventually resolves into a short psych-rock jam. While this shapeshifting might seem overwhelming, Marsalis provides some grounding wires: His work on guitar features heavily throughout, either looped (“Voyager,” “Divider”) or gently strummed (“Olde Joy,” “Decades, Castle Romeo”) to help bridge the tracks together.
While Marsalis is swiftly evolving his own sound, his work continues to nod to experimental artists like serpentwithfeet, King Krule, billy woods, and he has expanded his cast of collaborators and references to match his expanding horizons. Excelsior includes production credits from Chocolate Genius and assists from BADBADNOTGOOD drummer Alexander Sowinski; the tracklist includes a cover of eccentric audio engineer Joe Meek and a track (“Undercommons”) named after a collection of essays from the Black cultural theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. It’s a dense piece of work and a dizzying journey, but at its best, you get the sense Marsalis knows exactly where his spaceship is going.


Across a mostly fun, guest-filled 22 minutes, the young New York rapper does what needs to be done and puts on for his city.

State Of Emergency

The cover of Lil Tjay’s latest album features a portrait of the rapper wandering an empty New York street, mask fitted to his face, crows eerily circling overhead, everything tinted into an unnatural shade of blue. But instead of a treatise for  “these times,” State of Emergency remains focused on more historic issues. On opener “Ice Cold,” the South Bronx rapper mentions the global pandemic only to alley-oop a criticism of the education system—“JT my aroma, city got Corona/Sad to say I know like just two niggas with diplomas.” As it turns out, Tjay is more interested in addressing the NYC murder rate than the rate of infection. By the time guest rapper Sleepy Hallow shows up on “Wet Em Up Pt.2” to drop a bar like, “No Corona, boy, I’m too sick,” it’s outlandishly clear that this isn’t going to be a probing examination of this terrifying new horror.
Instead, State of Emergency is an act of defiance as the 19-year-old Tjay and a supporting cast of local rappers pledge love and loyalty to their home soil. On “My City,” Tjay gives thanks for his recent success while remembering the hardships and incarceration that color his origin story. On “City on My Back,” he teams up Jay Critch—a rapper who always seems to be on the cusp of a breakthrough—to make specious assertions like, “We put the city on the map.” Sure, but the underlying message of State of Emergency is clear: New York rap is going nowhere.
Some traditionalists will simply never take to Tjay’s voice. Chirping, tuneful, unorthodox, it can resemble an off-key American Idol contestant or his most apparent forefather, Young Thug. There are times when his vocals fly too close to the sun: The repetitive, high-pitched hook of “Shoot For The Stars” borders on abrasive. But when he hits the sweet spot, Tjay’s vocals offer a smooth counterpoint to some of the huskier Brooklyn drill rappers in his orbit.
Perhaps of most consequence here is “Zoo York,” featuring Pop Smoke, tragically shot dead earlier this year. The pair went together like steak and shakes—Smoke’s fire iron vocals contrasting Tjay’s pleasing pop-rap. “Zoo York” is diluted by Fivio Foreign, an associate who struggles to keep up, but over a beat that carries all the familiar Brooklyn drill hallmarks—engulfing womp-womp bassline, foggy keys, general sense of peril—it reasserts the lost potential of a Pop-Tjay team-up full-length record to be a catastrophe for the culture.
Lil Tjay will probably better albums than this. State of Emergency is too thin at just 22-minutes, too hastily assembled, too stuffed with guests that take attention away from the star. But with a healthy number of his peers committed to pulling New York rap into strange new terrain, Tjay refreshes his commitment to represent his city—and reminds us that the wounded neighborhoods aren’t going to disappear and, eventually, everything will be OK.


The expansive, emotionally weathered *Integrity Blues is *perhaps Jimmy Eat World's best record since Bleed American, and even serves as its unlikely spiritual sequel.

Integrity Blues

Jim Adkins had written himself off. Judging from the open letter announcing Integrity Blues, the Jimmy Eat World frontman had spent the band’s first-ever hiatus soul-searching. For 15 years, Jimmy Eat World had been judged against their self-help smash hit “The Middle,” and this past April, Taylor Swift gave it a signal boost with an uncomfortably mixed message: “I used to listen to this in middle school!”  The expansive, emotionally weathered Integrity Blues sounds nothing like “The Middle,” but it’s perhaps their best record since then on account of being its unlikely spiritual sequel.
It does feel odd praising Adkins for taking the initiative to actually write about himself, given Jimmy Eat World’s status to many as emo’s quintessential band. But unlike the other songwriters responsible for breaking emo onto alt-rock radio in early ’00s, Adkins never created a persona that made him inextricable from his music, allowing the audience rather than the author to inhabit the role of the narrator—this is why Clarity and Bleed American have aged much better than unearthed LiveJournals like The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most or Deja Entendu. But after Bleed American redeemed Jimmy Eat World commercially, their albums have been increasingly self-conscious and reactionary: the blue-black millennial malaise of Futures led to the peacocking radio-rock of Chase This Light; the band reunited with Clarity and Bleed American producer/donut innovator Mark Trombino for Invented, an ambitious and uneven collection of character sketches inspired by Cindy Sherman and Hannah Starkey photography. It led to another precipitous drop in sales and was followed by the streamlined Damage, pitched as an “adult breakup record,” but sounding complacent and AOR enough to soundtrack a date night movie at AMC Cinema.
Their new partnership with Justin Meldal-Johnsen on Integrity Blues is both sensible and inspired: he’s worked on recent records for Paramore and Tegan and Sara, acts with emo foundations who are unrepentantly making rewarding pop now and Jimmy Eat World is as much a pop act as Carly Rae Jepsen is emo. Meldal-Johnsen is perhaps best known as the producer and bassist for M83—a band that sounds little like Jimmy Eat World, but still uses “can you still feel the butterflies” as an operating artistic principle, creating fantastical safe spaces in which teenage melodrama is a life-sustaining renewable resource rather than an escape.
At least from a production standpoint, Integrity Blues is the exact opposite of what the title promises: it’s a complete fabrication of a four-person rock band, a proudly produced record where barely anything sounds like it does in its natural state. The guitar that opens “You With Me” is almost comically opulent, like a harp strung with liquid crystal and wrapped in icicle lights. Falsetto harmonies channel an ultralight beam through stained glass, sounding closer to the synth-prog hosannahs of Mew or Passion Pit. Every element of Zach Lind’s drum set is tweaked with crackling EQ and Rick Burch’s bass is a pulsating synth bubble. And yet the modesty that would often dulled and sanitized Chase This Light and Damage provides necessary heft on Integrity Blues. “You With Me” still feels like four guys in a room.
Integrity Blues is in the exquisite, crystalline mold of “Polaris” or “Ten” and they’ve never successfully spent the majority of any album in this mode until now. The rumbling exposition of “Sure and Certain” and its choral liftoff nods back at professed superfans Chvrches, “It Matters” is unusually slinky and guitar-free, “Pretty Grids” is damn near translucent. Elsewhere, they prove deft and evoking their past glory without rehashing it: actual adult breakup ballad “The End Is Beautiful” is a crossbreed of “Hear You Me” and“Cautioners,” and Jimmy Eat World can still write spring-loaded, major-third melodies (“Through”) and add to their flawless run of 6+-minute epics (closer “Pol Roger” is “23”going on 40).
The deceptively worded “You With Me” (“what makes our love so hard to be/is it you or is that you with me?”) is also indicative of Adkins’ subtle and progressive growth as a lyricist. Freed from the narrative strictures that Damage and Invented couldn’t support, Integrity Blues unpacks an adulthood spent “destination addicted,” whether the arrival is financial, romantic or even emotional success. At times, it’s almost like he’s ripping up the lyric sheets of his past—20 years after “Episode IV” promised a chance to dance all night, Adkins sneers, “But that’s something we never do...there’s my dream, doesn’t that sound good to you?” “Our weakness is the same, we need poison sometimes,” went the refrain on Clarity’s intoxicating “Ten”; Integrity Blues' frostbitten title track declares, “no one’s making you spend lonely nights poisoned through and through.”
Even in his less resolute days, Adkins was always a try-hard type, and and his new bootstraps mentality can aggravate that impulse: the thematically impenetrable “Pass the Baby” creeps from a monotone, no-fi electronic lurch to math-rock pummeling, a reminder that Adkins once branded himself a Jesus Lizard ripoff artist and proof that menace and obscurity are the opposite of what they’re good at. Lead single “Get Right” serves as Integrity Blues’ thesis (“disguised as patience, time gets wasted”), but it's probably the least compelling Jimmy Eat World single ever released.
It’s immediately followed by one of their best; “You Are Free” is earnest and comforting, on the edge of cloying, and unabashedly anthemic—like all of Jimmy Eat World’s best songs, it tells you what you need to hear right when you’re vulnerable enough to hear it. “Amazing the emotional bridges, tunnels, roads and ways we go around what’s one step from our face,” Adkins sings. “You Are Free” echoes the sentiments of “The Middle,” but not its belief that “everything will be alright”—it can be, if you’re willing to accept your responsibility.
Though Jimmy Eat World hasn’t had much part in the ongoing renaissance of emo—in fact, some of it may be a reaction to what Bleed American hath wrought—Integrity Blues finds itself sharing its dominant concern of using the genre’s inherent vulnerability and introspection to promote self-esteem rather than self-pity. Summarizing his view of integrity, Adkins sings, “It’s all what you do when no one cares,” on the title track, written during a brief solo tour where he played to small crowds in bars and churches in places like Billings, MT and Maquoketa, IA. It’s indicative of Integrity Blues’ diamond-cut polish that this is the rawest thing here—while Adkins is backed by tearful Sigur Rós strings, his vocals are completely unadorned, possibly even first-take. It just took some time, but we’re finally hearing what Adkins has to say for himself.


The Scissor Sisters frontman’s solo debut could’ve been a disaster: A pop star moseys down to New Orleans to find “real music.” But if you’re not a stickler for authenticity, it’s actually irresistible.

Jake Shears

In his existential 1963 novel City of Night, which follows a male sex worker hustling his way across America after dark, John Rechy maps out the four waves of revelers drawn to New Orleans for Mardi Gras: First come the hustlers and their “lean young faces… with maybe guitars and patched bags if any,” hitchhiking or via Greyhound. Next, the “restless queens” who don drag to “challenge—and, Maybe, for an instant, be acknowledged by—the despising, arrogant, apathetic world that produced them and exiled them.” After them, the deluge of “tired richmen, the tired richwomen… and the other Young men and women—equally curious but not as defiant.” Finally, there are the inevitable “busloads of carefully chartered tours” in a “determined pilgrimage to Frantic Happiness.”
Similar waves crashed over postmillennial Brooklyn. The sedimentary layers of modern gentrification, after all, tend to go: artists and queer people, then tastemakers, then tourists. Jake Shears and his fellow Scissor Sisters arrived in the borough during the first phase and came up through its electroclash scene but quickly changed costumes, sewing the sincere glam of Peter Allen and the sleaze of the Skatt Bros into electro-disco confections both tacky and catchy. “Frantic happiness” turns out to be an apt description of what they had to offer, and their audience grew in waves much like Rechy’s—particularly in Europe, where they were for a moment the brightest stars in the firmament. Americans, at least those who didn’t live in the night cities, mostly resisted their charms. They were simply too much.
City of Night ends with a spectacular psychological breakdown, and to hear Shears tell it in Boys Keep Swinging, his recent memoir, so did Scissor Sisters. He moved to New Orleans to write that book and this debut solo album. Jake Shears could have been an insufferable disaster: A pop star cleans up and moseys on down to New Orleans to find real music, man, and, in its appropriated authenticity, himself. It could have been a hodgepodge of Lestat and “Treme,” a “New Orleans state of mind” groaner, a “problematic” post-Lemonade whitewash. It could have been more flotsam dredged up by the dispiriting (and gentrification-adjacent) wave of pop stars gone rootsy—Timberlake’s woods, Kanye’s frontier, the rural dives of Lady Gaga’s Joanne.
Instead, Jake Shears is a breeze, with members of My Morning Jacket and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band gathering to lay down the tracks in single takes. The result is pretty irresistible, as long as you’re not looking for authenticity, and if you don’t mind vocals that sound like a honky-tonk take on jazz hands deployed in the service of lyrics like “Cuz baby I love you/More than the trash can.” (And that’s a rave, not a read; for Shears, nothing succeeds like excess.) He sells the hell out of “S.O.B.” and “Clothes Off,” tracks that could be cleverer as they shimmy in the shadows of Bourbon Street, rather than on the throbbing floor of the Mineshaft, but mostly do the trick. In the grim but game “Creep City,” he shakes it Chaka-style during verses that descend like “Tell Me Something Good,” if the only good news on offer were that death and its marching band will come for us all someday. “The Bruiser” is a leering “Nightclubbing” manqué that sounds unconvincingly masc, which might be the point; speaking of butch identity, the dude in “Big Bushy Mustache” sure would like to embrace his, if only his girlfriend would let him. Something tells me his desire for “a silky carpet with the drapes to match” and a “neon pink Mustang” might be queering the deal.
Tracks like “Good Friends” carry on Scissor Sisters’ inimitable legacy of imaginary love themes to Muppet movies in which Kermit falls for Fozzie. Three ballads are among the best Shears has ever made: “Everything I’ll Ever Need” is a banjo-and-Bee Gees showstopper. “All for What” glows with a backwoods glamor, like Roxy Music using slide guitars in place of synths. And “Palace in the Sky” is so City of Night that if revelers don’t end up humming it while their coke-ruined noses drip blood into strangers’ bathroom sinks, I’ll eat Shears’ feather boa.
It’s true, Jake Shears is performative. It might veer into appropriation here and there, particularly in its closer, “Mississippi Delta (I’m Your Man).” But faux isn’t always false. After calling New Orleans almost everything else, Rechy praised the city as a “Pied Piper playing a multikeyed tune to varikeyed ears.” Generations later, it’s a hell of a good time hearing Shears sing along.


The 1972 classic is given a remaster and a deluxe reissue.

The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St. [Deluxe Edition]

Exile on Main St. [Deluxe Edition]

Despite an absence of the band's best-known songs, the sweaty, grimy Exile on Main St. has grown into the Rolling Stones' most universally acclaimed record. Despite dozens of hits, putting together a cohesive album often seemed to be beyond the Stones, tripped up by either manager Allen Klein's publishing-rights parasitism or the band's 1970s hubris. That leaves a catalog in which only Exile is built not on hits but on vibe and: the album's singularly sleazy sound and making-of legend.
To create Exile, the band escaped Britain as tax exiles, decamping to a French villa. Paradoxically, the posh surroundings created the band's rawest effort. They were a heroin-ragged band, jamming late into the night with calloused fingers and vocal cords in a stale basement with sweaty walls. So the best thing a remastered reissue of the record can do is not give the production a bath, a shave, and a haircut. Happily, this new cleanup job doesn't Photoshop out the flaws and flubs, with the band's loose performances still presented in all its debauched glory.
Of course, like most treasured nuggets of rock history, that story is undermined by pesky facts. In Stones in Exile, the documentary released with this 38th anniversary reissue, producer Jimmy Miller talks about isolating each band member in a different room of the villa to make the impromptu studio work. That's a fitting image for the Rolling Stones at the time-- while the band was musically at its peak, it was in practice at its most fractured, with singer Mick Jagger and bassist Bill Wyman barely involved for the bulk of the recording. The Exile we know and love is actually the hybrid product of two sessions, two bands really: the Keith Richards-led material from Nellcôte shotgun-wed to the Los Angeles gospel dabbling of Jagger and co-conspirator, keyboardist and former Beatles collaborator Billy Preston.
In a way though, Jagger's lack of involvement may have been the key to Exile's success (and probably explains his oft-voiced dislike of the record). With Richards at the helm, the record sounds closest to the American roots music the band relentlessly name-dropped. Vocally, Richards' nasal whine fights for space with Jagger more than anywhere else in their history, adding thrillingly imperfect harmonies. The rest of the supporting cast also gets more of the spotlight: the brilliant barrelhouse piano of Nicky Hopkins singlehandedly defines "Loving Cup" and "Torn and Frayed", Mick Taylor adds counterpoint leads and the toodling bassline of "Tumbling Dice", Al Perkins' pedal steel and Bobby Key's sax contributes soul and country cred.
But despite his relative absence, Jagger's contributions on the back half of the record give Exile its dramatic arc. Though the album's concept record status has always been somewhat oversold, the plot does chart a rough path from drunken late-night revelry to next-day regret: The last third of the record looks back on the first two-thirds with a wince and a headache. "I Just Want to See His Face", "Let It Loose", "Shine a Light"-- there's a profound need for redemption here unique to the Stones, an odd moment of guilt for a band known for consequence-free sexual bluster. As the last complete sentence of the album says, "you're going to be the death of me."
Unlike the album proper, the bonus tracks are given a clean scrubbing, and it's blatantly obvious in places that Jagger's vocals are circa 2009, not 1972. That added grooming offers the experimental results of an Exile sans Nellcôte-- still a band in the zone, but more Jagger-dominant and sterilized. Still, many of the unreleased songs work: "Plundered My Soul", wins on the merits of its falsetto backing vocals, and "So Divine (Aladdin Story)" is like a pastiche of Aftermath-era Stones played by an older, saltier band.
If allowing Jagger to touch up those vocals was the price to pay to allow Exile receive the tribute it deserves, it's still a bargain. All the same, it's a bit strange to see the Stones, somehow still alive, on the talk show circuit celebrating the product of their darkest years, treating their addictions, tax evasion, and near-breakup as just a colorful set piece on Rolling Stones: The Ride. The true thrill of Exile on Main St. is that it doesn't require all that backstory to be dramatized and Ken Burns-ed-- all the pain, fun, joy, and regret of being the biggest rock band on Earth, kinda loving it and kinda hating it, is right there in the filthy grooves of the record. Oh, what a beautiful buzz.


Six tracks on an atmospheric new mini-album for Atlanta label Geographic North feel like dispatches from deep within a fogbank.

Carmen Villain: Sketch for Winter IX: Perlita

Sketch for Winter IX: Perlita

Perhaps Carmen Villain was always an ambient musician disguised as a singer-songwriter. There were clues: On her debut album, 2013’s Sleeper, the Mexican and Norwegian artist wrapped skeletal songs for guitar, drums, and voice in billowing layers of echo, like early Cat Power gone shoegaze. She leaned into her mood-setting instincts on 2017’s Infinite Avenue, drawing out resonant tendrils of guitar like wisps of candle smoke. Then, on her third album, 2019’s Both Lines Will Be Blue, she abandoned vocals in favor of purely instrumental excursions—dialing up the reverb, digging into dub rhythms, using church bells and thunderclaps to add overcast drama. Villain’s new mini-album for Atlanta label Geographic North’s Sketch for Winter series—collecting ambient recordings from artists like Pan•American, Seefeel’s Mark Van Hoen, and the cellist Louise Bock—is even more atmospheric. Its six instrumental tracks feel like dispatches from deep within a fogbank.
Villain is a good fit for a series tied to the emotional overtones of winter. Her brand of melancholy has always sounded made for lighthouses and log cabins, and Sketch for Winter IX: Perlita evokes a similar sense of solitude. It begins with near-whiteout conditions: “Everything Without Shadow” opens the album with four minutes of mostly featureless fuzz, with just the slightest hint of a tentative flute melody pushing through the murk. Over the tape’s 27 minutes, Villain luxuriates in bittersweet vibes, layering gentle, slow-moving refrains over hazy soundscapes that resist close listening but reward time spent in the echo chamber of one’s own feelings.
The tension between opacity and clarity gives the record its shape. Tracks typically assume form first as gaseous swirls of tone. Field recordings—birdsong, barking dogs, a burbling creek—imbue the music with a sense of place, while indecipherable scraps of conversation lend an intimate air. Out of this dreamlike expanse, melodies gradually take shape. In “Two Halves Touching,” a lilting flute figure mimics the swaying melodica of roots reggae. Flute, played by Villain’s frequent collaborator Johanna Scheie Orellana, takes an even more dominant role in the closing “Agua Azul,” the most song-like of the tape’s six tracks. In “Molina,” sustained piano chords cycle beneath a cosmic shimmer of guitar; in “Light in Phases,” a treated zither traces auroras above murmuring voices and tight spools of delay.
Low key and unassuming, these tracks don’t do much; they get by mainly on their powers of suggestion. But they’re easy to listen to, offering the familiar comfort of a faded woolen blanket. And, at their best, they make room for interesting things to happen, particularly when Villain turns her attention to rhythm. This was the case with “Dissolving Edges,” her contribution to the 2020 Geographic North compilation A Little Night Music: Its dubby pulse and grayscale sonics sounded like an attempt to reimagine the sounds of Berlin’s Chain Reaction label using Villain’s earthy toolkit. Here, she does something similar some two-thirds of the way through “Things That Are Solid,” as the song’s lullaby-like melody spins down and gives way to overlapping loops of breathy white noise and scraping sounds. Reminiscent of Bellows’ loop-based improvisations, it’s a quietly spellbinding passage, and the more it frays, the more engrossing it becomes.
Named after Villain’s grandmother, Sketch for Winter IX: Perlita feels in many ways like a companion piece to last year’s Affection in a Time of Crisis, Villain’s contribution to the Longform Editions series. Stretching held chords and cavernous static into a 20-minute reverie, that recording represents her most focused exploration of “pure” ambient music to date. Like the new album, it also foregrounds an airy flute melody that occasionally overpowers its surroundings. Villain’s work is more compelling when it’s not telling you how to feel, but rather inviting you to explore your own mode of listening, deep down where accidental sounds tangle up in the mix. By finding unusual patterns in creaking floorboards and cawing crows, taking inspiration from the organic shapes of snowdrifts and icicles, Villain offers a fine companion for a winter weekend holed up far from everything, alone with your thoughts and whistling wind.

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The Deerhunter guitarist/songwriter's fantastic second solo LP is unerringly tuneful and immediate, the sort of thing that seems unambitious until you step back and ask yourself just how many records actually manage to pull this off.

Lotus Plaza: Spooky Action at a Distance

Spooky Action at a Distance

Deerhunter is one of the most fascinating bands going because they're a democracy functioning the way most of us experience democracy, whether in politics or the workplace: fully participatory, but with a wildly disproportionate power structure. With Bradford Cox fronting the group as one of rock's most dominant personalities, it's easy to view Lockett Pundt as following in the lineage of reclusive guitar wizards who serve as a necessary counterbalance.  Whether or not Cox goes off the grid any given night, you can catch Pundt standing catatonically still and staring off into the distance when his gaze isn't intently focused on an armada of effects pedals.
Based on that persona, no one could've been surprised by his solo bow as Lotus Plaza, 2009's The Floodlight Collective. A mélange of looped guitar and amorphous vocals slathered in amniotic goo, it wouldn't have stood out in any year, and released smack dab in the midst of indie's deadbeat summer, it was the kind of solo record that could only be the result of a guy who goes to the greatest lengths possible to not get noticed. But even if he gets approximately 0% of the good quotes in any Deerhunter interview, the relatively egalitarian division of the band's songwriting labor makes Spooky Action At A Distance every bit as unsurprising as its predecessor. In an infinitely more rewarding way, of course: save for a minute-long intro that recalls Floodlight, these are nine reminders that Pundt also is responsible for soft-focus beauty of "Agoraphobia", "Neither of Us, Uncertainly", and the juggernaut centerpiece of Halcyon Digest, "Desire Lines". This consistency means Spooky Action lacks the galvanizing force of Deerhunter and the unpredictability of Atlas Sound, but in fully realizing its comparatively modest ambitions, it's one of the strongest indie rock records of the year so far.
Comparing how Cox and Pundt function in their solo ventures tempts a needless quarterback controversy, but nonetheless, it is helpful to see how they're complementary. While Atlas Sound allows Cox to indulge in genres, collaborations, and haircuts that wouldn't vibe with Deerhunter, Pundt tends to find inspiration in limitations, patterns and forms. Pundt prefers echoing guitar, slow-moving vocal melodies, and distorted washes that generally signify qualifiers like "shoegaze" and "dream-pop," but neither of those really sit well with me. The "dream" part implies exaggeration or illogic, while nearly all of Spooky Distance is handcrafted, thriving on structure and restraint-- a constant, kraut-like pulse, strict patterns of verses and choruses broken down into repeating chord progressions, loops, loops, and more loops.
Moreover, along the lines of Real Estate and especially the War On Drugs, Pundt embodies a wakeful, meditative state associated with various forms of transit: your physical being stays relatively still while being in motion, a symbiosis between human and mechanical effort. I can't help but think of each song here as having some sort of vehicular spirit animal, so to speak. As with "Desire Lines", the anti-flash "solo" that breaks from the casually soaring chorus of "Strangers" could be visually represented as medians on a deserted open road, and the anticipatory effect of its repetition brings the relief of arrival during the final minute of decrescendo. Meanwhile, the timbres on "Out of Touch" are fit for a vigorous bike ride, sleigh bells and metallic guitar loops jangling rhythmically over a cyclical kick drum pattern. The shambling acoustic closer "Black Buzz" feels just right for foot traffic, and "Jet Out of the Tundra" cruises at speed like its namesake, the same handful of chords repeating throughout a remarkably brisk seven minutes while Pundt seamlessly adds and removes trebly acoustic strums, Superball bass riffs, and a gorgeous, one-finger piano melody like he's slowly pulling levers in the cockpit. Spooky Action then plays out like ten self-contained, daily commutes where familiarity brings not contempt but a private joy in recognizing the landmarks and shortcuts.
Lest it seem like Spooky Action is an overly subtle work, it's worth reiterating that its 44 minutes are unerringly tuneful and immediate, the sort of thing that seems unambitious until you step back and ask yourself just how many records out there manage to actually pull it off. And Pundt's means of cranking out one instantly memorable chorus after another brings to mind someone who's incredibly good at sports wagering: there's surely some intuition and luck involved, but Pundt's a guy who's figured out how certain mismatches and trends work to his advantage. To get specific: the hyperextended guitar bends that push "White Galactic One" are technically a slight bit off, yet it's that serration that demonstrates why things like these are called "hooks." Where a specific minor chord might be more harmonically congruent, Pundt inserts a major and the result finds "Monoliths" and "Strangers" stocked with ear-turning melodies as opposed to folky familiarity. Heck, it's likely the greatest testament to Pundt's abilities that Spooky Action is in a major key and dedicated to simple pleasures of escape and memory more often than your typical "power-pop" record, and yet it always comes off as warm and generous rather than cloying.
And so while Lotus Plaza is truly a solo project for Pundt, I hear more purposeful solitude than isolation-- like reading a book or swimming laps, "antisocial" with all the pejorative connotations removed. Maybe I'm reading too much into things, but in light of Deerhunter's notoriously volatile personnel dynamic preceding Halcyon Digest, it's tempting to hear Lotus Plaza as Pundt's platonic ideal for a band, where people are as predictable and helpful as loops and are united in their pursuit of the kind of reverberant pop music that makes perfect sense for the times you most enjoy getting caught up in your own thoughts. It's a common ambition for artists to capture the music that plays out in their head and if Spooky Action is really what Pundt's hearing, you can't really blame him for looking so lost within himself all the time.


The New Orleans rapper’s latest album is a meditation on the gravest, most tranquil parts of modern American life, marked by moments of trauma and ones of tranquility. Quelle Chris guests on two key tracks.

Private Stock

The video for “Open Season,” a single from Cavalier’s lush, rewarding new album Private Stock, is punctuated with symbols of the reactionary South: a waving Confederate flag, a raised, white arm with REVOLUTION tattooed in block letters, the road sign for Lee Circle. This is New Orleans, a city that was once the epicenter of the American slave trade, became one of the most culturally vibrant cities on the continent, was destroyed by a hurricane, and is clawing its way back. Cav’s apartment is papered with printouts of articles detailing the removal of Confederate monuments and the ensuing backlash. As he rounds up his friends to grab a meal at a Creole restaurant, he and everyone else slip into robes and headwraps and seem to occupy another plane, at peace. But in short video clips, we see white protesters slashing fingers across their throats, defending the Robert E. Lee statue before it was finally toppled. The wheels on frozen daiquiri machines spin in flat, endless circles.
Cavalier is not from New Orleans, at least not originally. The Brooklyn native has been kicking around the headier corners of underground rap for some time now, perhaps best known for playing Ghostface to Quelle Chris’s Raekwon on the latter’s Niggas Is Men, a brilliant record that’s much narrower in scope than Cuban Linx, but at points nearly as virtuosic. In recent years, Cav has partnered with the Los Angeles-bred singer and producer Iman Omari, who handles the musical side of things and appears occasionally as a vocalist. Their effort prior to this, a 2015 EP called LemOnade, was, in hindsight, a slighter, formatted-to-fit-your-screen prelude to this album, full of jazz and warmth and stuttering drum patterns. Private Stock builds on that to create a meditation on the gravest and calmest parts of modern American life, marked by moments of trauma and ones of tranquility.
“Open Season” takes its name from comments that Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Georgia) made on the House floor in 2015 about police murders of black men and women. On “State of Mind,” Cav ponders Flint water and Floridian ground-standing and raps: “They tried to throw Harriet Tub on the front of a dub/Hilarious when little white girls in the club got one rolled to do rails/But not underground.” As a writer, Cav excels at slipping into the naturalistic (the taste of Old Bay seasoning, the way money clips fit in his pocket, different from rubber bands) and the utterly abstract without losing his narrative or ideological threads. His characters, even those who only get half a bar, are fully realized—“I know cats behind bars adorned with a fez/Or shorties who could shoplift a pregnancy test.” He’ll call himself “the last weedman in the apocalypse” and sound like he’s fully considered both the end days and the way eighth prices are reactive to ballot referendums six states away; his style is, as he says, “highbrow with a hot comb flow.”
As engrossing as Cav can be on his own, it’s his give-and-take with Quelle that drives Private Stock across the finish line. Quelle appears here on back-to-back songs, his chemistry with Cav pulling the latter into his loosest and most penetrating modes. (In addition to those two tracks, Quelle co-produced “Medicine Man” and helped arrange the album.) Niggas Is Men is notable, in part, for how it starts off freewheeling and becomes almost crushingly sober toward its end; in their two-song suite here, Cav and Quelle mimic that arc in miniature. “Watch Me” broaches anxiety and self-medication and the afterlife—and Cav watches someone order Chinese food with an IV still stuck in his arm—but is the breezier of the two cuts, with “Bar Therapy” turning more contemplative. “When y’all was wishin’, I was listenin’,” Cav raps. “I pay attention.” He flashes to images of “judges in black cloaks, gavels/Yards with gravel.” By the end of his verse, he’s hungry for more, praying. It’s Private Stock stripped down to the bone. Having considered the grisliest things, Cavalier is ready to write, full of life again.


Australia’s Impetuous Ritual take death metal to its outermost limits, with guitars that blossom and decay. On their latest, they progress by getting even more extreme.

Impetuous Ritual: Blight Upon Martyred Sentience

Blight Upon Martyred Sentience

Australia’s Impetuous Ritual have solidified their place in their country’s tradition of taking death metal to its outermost limits. They’ve taken a Panopticon-like approach (the idea, not the band), and built cavernous walls of perpetually howling guitars; were it not for drums blistering in the deep background, it would be formless. It does not seem like a sound that would lend itself to progression, but then again, Impetuous Ritual do not progress in the conventional metal sense. Growing as a metal band usually entails getting more melodic, working in more prog and experimental elements, or going for a more commercial sound. Blight Upon Martyred Sentience, their third full-length, is as impenetrable as their first two, while advancing in the only way they could—getting even more extreme.
Blight begins how 2014’s Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence ended: a churn that feels inescapable, where the band is wearing you down gradually. Guitarists Ignis Fatuus and Omenous Fugue, both members of avant-death metal band Portal, blossom and decay throughout, sounding like they’re both building and disintegrating at the same time. It makes the next two songs, “Apoptosis” and “Inordinate Disdain”—both faster, chaotic tracks—feel more restless. The former lashes out suddenly; death metal’s familiar atonality gets severed and floats like a pack of malevolent ghosts. Throughout, the guitarists throw out lead patterns without warning, and they are more noticeable than on previous Impetuous Ritual records, where they were buried. Unholy was defined by its devotion to an unending marathon of down-tuned rhythm; Blight is more about smashing through that foundation.
Ignis Fatuus’ vocals are so low they’re sometimes barely indistinguishable from the guitars, similar to how Will Rahmer of Mortician blends his guttural voice with his bass. While Impetuous Ritual does have (scant) lyrics, Blight effectively functions as wordless music. (Their song titles are impeccable death metal word salad, though, an example that metal thrives on absurdity, inadvertent or not.) That isn’t unusual for death metal, where comprehension comes close to dead last, and it’s also true of Impetuous Ritual’s previous work, though Blight makes the case that vocals can really be a textural element. In reverse, when the guitars shriek in a higher register, they create an interplay with Fatuus’ vocals. “Synchronous Convergence,” in particular, shows how the guitars and vocals trade off like singers. You can recommend Blight to more metal-inclined Cocteau Twins fans as easily as Incantation diehards.
Blight is a more grueling affair than its predecessor. And yet, across the album, it’s also easier to trace Impetuous Ritual’s lineage. The brutality currently emanating from Australia is so far on metal’s fringes that it looks nothing like any form of rock music, and more like noise with metal instrumentation. But in bringing the leads up in the mix—“leads” here meaning anything deviating from the churning rhythm, not always in the classic metal sense—Impetuous Ritual show their debt to Sadistik Exekution guitarist Reverend Kriss Hades, who conjured million-note flurries on an ultra-scalloped guitar. They also nod to Bestial Warlust’s Joe Skullfucker and K.K. Warslut’s “war metal,” which simplified black metal into a faster and freer form. Bestial Warlust has long been inactive, and Sadistik Exekution isn’t likely to reform after a sluggish one-off reunion in 2009, which leaves Impetuous Ritual to spearhead a new direction in metal barbarism, for their country and abroad.


Bay Area composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's Euclid is her most complete album yet, with a range that encompasses something approaching song structure and a form of ambient drift that nimbly floats up into the stratosphere.

Euclid

There’s a gentle kind of alchemy at work on Euclid, making it feel like the work of someone with an unshakable belief in magic. Bay Area composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has produced works before, ranging from the glacial wistfulness of Useful Trees to electronic compositions with a distinctly agrarian hue (Cows will eat the weeds). This album, her first for Western Vinyl, is Smith’s most complete album yet, with a range that encompasses something approaching song structure and a form of ambient drift that nimbly floats up into the stratosphere. The overall feeling of enchantment is only heightened by learning that Euclid was recorded primarily on a Buchla Music Easel, a synth as colorful as the sounds it creates, and vocal passages that only occasionally resemble words. She puts some separation between its two sides, flooding Euclid’s first half with song-y material then plunging into a reflective pool in its backend, making it feel like Smith took out a pair of scissors and carefully cut the record in two.
The most noticeable trait of Euclid is how light it feels—there’s very little bass, nothing much to hold it down. It appears to just float there in front of you, opening up its kaleidoscopic layers. Smith grew up in isolation, on an island in Washington state, and there’s a certain singularity to her work that surely grew out of those roots. She often appears adrift in her music, endlessly laying strips of sound over one another until everything’s just right. For "Careen", Smith works in a space similar to the one inhabited by High Places in the latter part of the last decade, where hippy idylls, rustic charm, and gusty pop combine as one. If there is a darker component to her work it’s in the processed vocals, which resemble the type of squelchy effects Karin Dreijer Andersson tried on for the Knife’s Silent Shout on "Wide Awake". Still, those are only loose comparisons—a big part of the charm of Euclid is in hearing someone mapping out their own space and time, figuring out their own destination to land in.
Of the first half-dozen songs here it’s in "Sundry" that everything coalesces, with Smith drawing on a tone that’s just the right side of whimsical. It’s here that her instrumental passages squeak and cry, feeling like she’s conducting a dialogue with them through the wordless vocal inflections skirting across the top. There’s joy, although not the kind that gives over to abandon—her music is slightly too studied for that. Smith indulges the considered side of her personality further on the set of "Labyrinth"-themed tracks that make up the second half of Euclid, where rain-like trickles of synth vie with cloudier electronics and deep pulses purposefully obscured in the mix. It’s in a similar sphere to Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe, where rhythms come together then break apart, where a single one- or two-note riff becomes a macrocosm unto itself. Sometimes it’s a little too blurry, but it’s superseded by the way Smith works her way around sounds to open up new dimensions in them.
There’s a video clip of Smith playing her Music Easel, which enforces this album’s air of beauty mixed in with color and conjury. Smith plugs brightly colored cables into its modular interface and her hands drift over its silvery keys, creating an expanse of sound that’s more elastic than you might expect from just a few operations. There’s an element of gear fetishization to it for sure, but also a healthy dose of wonder, causing it to feel like you’re watching someone just as enamored of the process of discovery as they are with delivering a final product. That’s a useful way to describe Euclid, with Smith figuring out a place to operate in somewhere between structure and freedom, often indulging one and not the other. This feels like a beginning rather than a natural way forward, but it’s driven by an important idea—where the process of separation can be a more powerful and intuitive way of working than forcing harmony upon contrasting ideas.


The L.A. beatmaker’s 11th release on Leaving Records moves between wobbly R&B loops, musique concrète, stoned sonic detours, and E.T.-friendly G-funk.

Ras G & the Afrikan Space Program: Stargate Music

Stargate Music

Los Angeles beat warper Ras G has spent the better part of the past decade flaunting his alien status, with titles like Brotha From Anotha Planet and El-Aylien Part II: C.razy A.lien accompanying disjointed productions as dizzying as the Milky Way. His copious output (including four albums in 2016 alone) places him in a constellation of prolific beatmakers like Madlib, Knxwledge, and Karriem Riggins. But recently he’s been dropping back down to earth. Stargate Music, his 11th release on Leaving Records, is dedicated (or “livicated,” according to Ras G’s terminology) “to the Womb-man...to the Vagina, The Stargate.”
Ras G’s choice of theme places the album in a lineage extending through Gustave Courbet’s “The Origin of the World” and Funkadelic’s “Nappy Dugout,” but Stargate Music’s concept comes across more as an abstract notion than a literal one; the album lopes through drunken R&B loops, musique concrète, stoned sonic detours, and E.T.-friendly G-funk. Opener “Primordial Water Formations 1” bears all the squelches and static from the dawn of electronic music, like a sonogram from INA-GRM. And the gurgling rhythms of “Water Broken (The Opening of the Stargate)” find Ras G making taffy of a vocal snippet that’s closer in execution to the destabilizing ring modulations of voices on Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Gesang Der Jünglinge” than to any of his Brainfeeder brothers.
On “The Arrival,” Ras G uses playground handclaps (evocative of FlyLo’s “Putty Boy Strut”) before veering off into a spongy space filled with vocal scatting, laser pulses, and alien radio signals squiggling in the mix. Throughout, Ras G tends to fidget about, and most pieces move on after just a few minutes, never ending up quite where they began. “Quest to Find Anu Stargate” packs the set’s heaviest wallop, but soon, diaphanous jazz chords looming behind the beat spread wider and an R&B coo gently muffles the kick, so that the track winds up feeling more like a drifter than a banger.
The back half of the album becomes harder to pin down, as Ras G switches up styles every few minutes. Phased funk guitar loops, dusted flutes, melted vocal snippets, and flat-tire drum loops wobble in the mix, thumping erratically like sneakers in the dryer. Whether these sounds fizzle or snap, they soon give way to something new. An eerie group chant crops up near album’s end that could have been sampled from some strange, Osho-esque cult recording—which is perhaps only fitting. Bearing titles like “The Nector of Stargate (taste),” “Is It Lust or Love,” and “Heaven is between her legs... (Initiate the return),” Stargate ultimately suggests that as much as Ras G positions himself as an astral traveller, he’s also an earthbound horndog.


Liverpudlian Philip Jeck studied visual art at the Dartington College of Arts in Devon, England. During the early 80s, he ...

Stoke

Liverpudlian Philip Jeck studied visual art at the Dartington College of Arts in Devon, England. During the early 80s, he drifted from painting and sculpture to music, and began working with old and discarded turntables. Though he's roughly a contemporary of Christian Marclay, recognition for Jeck came much later, beginning in 1993 with his massive installation "Vinyl Requiem", which incorporated 180 record players and multiple film projections. Since then, he's released several solo records for Touch and the German label Intermedium, and has collaborated with Otomo Yoshihide, among many others.
Much of Jeck's solo output is culled from edits of live performances. Using a number of battered turntables, a Casio keyboard, and a CD player or minidisc, Jeck creates dense, pulsating sound collages from the grooves of ancient and forgotten records. Like Yoshihide and Marclay, Jeck is no DJ. Though he stands over his decks with headphones on, his intention and methods with records has nothing to do with beat-matching or spinning tunes. Records are truly just sound sources for Jeck, raw material to be shaped via mixer and effects into his ghostly compositions.
Listening to his most recent album, Stoke, it's hard not to think about Jeck's background in visual art, and how it informs his audio work. There's something very cinematic about these pieces, though the music sounds nothing like a soundtrack. Some of the visual referencing could come from the regular pops and scrapes in the vinyl, which are reminiscent of the sound of a spool of film being fed into a projector. Jeck's endlessly rotating platters, like the whirr of moving film, serve as a constant reminder of the time-based nature of the medium. These pieces happen, and all you can do as a listener is try to extract information before they fade back into nothingness. You have to listen close and listen often.
Stoke finds Jeck more in the realm of focus and refinement. While the tracks in his "Vinyl Coda" series (worth checking out, by the way) ranged from 20 to 60 minutes, the seven distinct pieces here average less than eight. The relatively tight construction of the tracks means that Jeck can hone in on a single sonic idea and amplify it, extracting the maximum amount of emotional material from a few grimy loops. "Pax" is an uncharacteristically minimal piece combining a simple organ refrain and slowed-down vocals, possibly from an old gospel 78. The keyboard is very clean-sounding and might not be sourced from a record, but it perfectly complements the churched-up feel of the warped vocal, stretching the anguish of the indecipherable lyric to its breaking point.
"Close" uses ancient recordings of sacred music from another culture to beautiful effect, this time the ringing sounds of Indian classical. The undisciplined hiss of a loose sitar string is clipped to ribbons, then looped and recombined to sound like a warning, some indeterminate alarm sounding through a Himalayan valley. The piece takes a stunning left turn in its final quarter, turning to a loop of surface noise with an echoing and unbearably lonesome vocal floating on top.
"Lambing" is Jeck in drone mode, patiently adding and removing layers of sound and noise whose vinyl sources remain a complete mystery. The style on "Lambing" could be considered Jeck's signature, and it's amazing what he accomplishes through additive processes. There's something wonderfully machine-like about the operation. Since Jeck has the entire world of sound at his disposal, he has to figure how much of it to let in at any given moment, like mixing air with fuel inside a carburetor. Stoke proves him a master mechanic.


Dev Hynes follows Test Icicles and Lightspeed Champion with a new solo project, a highly stylish album that frequently forgoes things like melodies, energy, and vocal choruses in favor of slinky, solitary guitar lines and seductively spare, post-punk atmospherics.

Coastal Grooves

As a member of short-lived dance punks Test Icicles, Dev Hynes abused eardrums and EQ levels with glee. Since that group's demise, he's flashed surprising proclivities towards lush, orchestral-tinged folk-pop in the vein of Okkervil River with his solo project Lightspeed Champion. There have been growing pains at every step along the way, but they were always the result of Hynes admirably trying to do too much, trying to pour too many words and ideas and emotions into his compositions. So it's a real shock listening to Coastal Grooves, the debut LP released under Hynes' newest solo moniker, Blood Orange. Coastal Grooves is all about what's missing-- it's a highly stylish album that frequently forgoes things like melodies, energy, and vocal choruses in favor of slinky, solitary guitar lines and seductively spare, post-punk atmospherics.
Most of the album's 10 tracks feel like promising skeletal demos of songs that are close to being truly great. Hynes is a gifted and voracious guitarist, displaying here particular predilections for sounds from Asia and the American West. Aside from a couple of purely moody pieces ("Can We Go Inside Now", "Complete Failure"), Coastal Grooves is also largely propelled by strong, strutting rhythmic foundations, while Hynes' vocals remain appealingly florid throughout.
The problem is there are almost no payoffs. Far too often, Hynes lays intriguing groundwork for a sexy, indie-funk jam or a sweetly kissed pop song, arrives at the chorus, and gives us only a stark guitar line or plinky little rhythm. I suppose this minimalist approach is in keeping with the album's artfully space-conscious post-punk leanings, and sometimes the device is evocative (particularly on first single "Sutphin Boulevard"), but it gets to a point with Coastal Grooves that you halfway start expecting to hear Hynes mumble, "Chorus goes here," during some of the seemingly placeholding moments. Subsequently, the few songs that have genuine vocal refrains-- like "Forget It" and "The Complete Knock"-- end up feeling more fleshed out and dynamic than they really are.
Hynes is the type of demonstrative, emotionally engaging artist who definitely feels more at home being messily overambitious than coolly restrained. The sounds he pursues here as Blood Orange might be more hip than his work as Lightspeed Champion, but the end results are less satisfying. Ideally, a blend of the two styles would be best, the artfulness of one project with the human connection of the other. So which sounds better: Blood Champion, or Lightspeed Orange?


The Aussie psych-rock group’s fifth album of 2017 is anything but a tossed-off afterthought, showing a new dedication to pop craftsmanship.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Gumboot Soup

Gumboot Soup

If anyone had reason to celebrate this past New Year’s Eve, it was King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. On December 31, the Australian psych-rock collective finally fulfilled their long-standing promise to release five new albums in 2017, surreptitiously making Gumboot Soup available on their Bandcamp page hours before the year came to a close. Whether they were scrambling to make the deadline or were just withholding the new record until the last possible moment for dramatic effect, the photo finish felt just right for a wildly unpredictable band that always seems to be flying by the seat of its cut-off shorts, yet always manages to get the job done. The remarkable thing about King Gizzard’s 2017 isn’t just that they managed to release five records—it’s that not a moment of them felt half-assed. They didn’t cook the books by dropping a 30-minute improv jam or cobbling together a bunch of acoustic song sketches and calling it an album. Whether it was released by a big label like ATO, a small Aussie indie like Flightless, or, well, you, each of their 2017 releases is an elaborately constructed, carefully considered statement that opened up new universes for the band to explore.
A title like Gumboot Soup might suggest a sloppy collection of leftovers, but the record features some of the most delicately rendered songs ever released by this bull-in-a-china-shop band. In it, you’ll hear echoes of the band’s other 2017 releases—the ominous eco-conscious parables of Flying Microtonal Banana, the over-the-top motorik metal of Murder of the Universe, the jazzy looseness of Sketches of Brunswick East, the pastoral prog of Polygondwanaland. But there’s an emphasis on pop craftsmanship and concision here that greatly distinguishes it from its immediate predecessors (not to mention a gesture toward late-’70s Bowie-esque art-funk, via “Down the Sink,” that constitutes another new look for this stylistically promiscuous group).
Where the vocals in a given King Gizzard song tend to mimic the pattern of the main guitar riff or underlying rhythm (often encouraging mantric repetition), here, the arrangements rally around the melodies. Keyboardist Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s atypically relaxed voice leads the way on the gently swinging cocktail-lounge pop of “The Last Oasis,” gradually submerging the song in a blissful, aquatic whirl. And the dreamy, psychedelic soft-rock of “Beginner’s Luck” is so enchanting, you could be forgiven for thinking its scenes of high-stakes casino gambling constituted a celebration of excess, rather than a cautionary allegory for unchecked greed. (The spastic, squawking guitar solo that overtakes the song in its final minute brings the band’s subversive intent to the fore.)
As “Beginner’s Luck” makes clear from the outset, Gumboot Soup’s tilt toward pop accessibility doesn’t come at the expense of the band’s burgeoning social conscience. King Gizzard’s recent records have toed the line between wacky and woke, but on Gumboot Soup, the apocalyptic allusions become all the more vivid, as if bearing the crushing weight of all the geopolitical misery that 2017 wrought. Over a rumbling Can groove, the self-explanatory “Greenhouse Heat Death” finds ringleader Stu McKenzie singing of environmental degradation from the Earth’s perspective in the pained croak of a torture victim. And the growling “Great Chain of Being” would verge on heavy-metal parody if only its megalomaniacal ravings (“I usurp the precious stones/I have come to take the throne/I transcend the natural flesh/I will lay your god to rest”) didn’t resemble dispatches from the Oval Office. Even the band’s clarion call for off-the-grid living, “Muddy Water,” is rendered as a sax-blasted blitzkrieg boogie, as if to suggest that our time to enjoy nature’s spoils is rapidly running out.
But if there’s a song here that best sums up the events of the past year—for both the band and the world at large—it’s “I’m Sleepin’ In.” In its downsized, vacuum-sealed sound and slumberous spirit, it’s a worthy successor to the pantheon of John Lennon songs about getting some shut-eye. And like those tunes, it’s less a slacker’s anthem than a cry for help, a plea to disconnect from the pressures of the outside world. “I need to locate the switch hidden in me/Which will turn me off,” McKenzie sings. Given that he’s just released five musically and ideologically dense albums in 12 months, dude has more than earned the right to power down.


Former Ridgewood, NJ-based singer/songwriter takes a major creative leap, refining his eclectic collage-pop aesthetic while retaining its emotional tug.

Mare

Julian Lynch first hit our radar last year with a few promising tracks on the first Underwater Peoples compilation, followed by Orange You Glad, his debut release (and first non-CDR full-length) for the Brooklyn-based experimental label Olde English Spelling Bee. The record introduced us to his folksy collage-pop aesthetic, but while often beautiful, its low fidelity often felt more like a hindrance than a benefit, and the more traditional song structures could feel slight or meandering. His newest album, Mare, is another story. An earthy, eclectic record that manages to be challenging, but also remarkably patient, it's the sound of the formerly Ridgewood, NJ-based songwriter quietly coming into his own.
Lynch once worked for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, and now studies ethnomusicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and you can hear those diverse influences at work on Mare: The music is recorded on humble equipment, is rough around the edges, and pulls liberally from lots of different genres. There are traces of drone, noise, and African percussion, for instance, alongside more traditional pop and rock elements. His instrumentation is unusual and eclectic, incorporating clarinet, watery guitar lines, shuffling maracas, and delicate drum work. But where bedroom pop tends to be somber and even unsettling at times, Lynch's music is very much at ease with itself. And it sounds very organic. Tracks are experimental in composition but ultimately echo the mood of folk or country-- music that feels like it should be played outdoors.
There's a kicked-back, front-porch quality to the album-- songs are sedate and unfurl slowly. Lynch sings but obscures his vocals until they act as a loose guide rather than a specifc blueprint. So Mare is primarily about atmosphere, and in that sense it's very much like an ambient record. And as with good ambient, it soothes without drifting off into the distance. This balance is key to the record's success, and Lynch acheives it with a smart rhythmic touch. "Interlude" is airy and gentle but it has propulsion and direction. Under its woozy synths and indistinct vocal coos is a funky guitar line that keeps it moving forward.
The album is also sneakily complex. You can just let it wash over you-- and it's good at that-- but the closer attention you pay, the more detail emerges. "Ruth, My Sister" is a pleasant wisp on first pass, but more spins show a dynamic arrangement that builds tension an inch at a time. And the sequencing is excellent: The record picks up steam around the seventh track, "Ears", which is bright and celebratory and just the right amount of spark so things don't become sleepy. Lynch is also smart to save some of his most straightforward material for the end of the record as a nice payoff. "Travelers" is probably the poppiest thing here-- just a simple vocal hook and melodic bassline-- but totally effective within the larger scheme.
One of the most likable things about Mare is that, for how druggy and narcotized it sounds, it doesn't comes across as sad or tuned-out. A lot of artists use these kinds of woozy textures to enhance a detached viewpoint, but ultimately this is colorful and engaged music. It's relaxed and inviting, and if the idea of summer music wasn't so generally overstated then I'd say it's also very season-appropriate. More centrally, though, it's a major creative step forward for Lynch, whose absorbing ambient pop sounds prove how refreshing this kind of subtlety can be. That's an easy sentiment to embrace.