Veteran studio rat Sarah Tudzin steps out from behind the boards on a debut album that uses the timeless conventions of indie-pop to capture the experience of being a young adult in 2018.

Kiss Yr Frenemies

When it comes to volume, Sarah Tudzin likes to keep listeners on their toes. Kiss Yr Frenemies, her debut album as Illuminati Hotties, playfully leaps between a variety of decibel-dictated sonic moods from the indie-pop canon. Hushed acoustic reveries give way to knife-sharp stabs of guitar; contemplative, finger-picked tranquility crescendos to giant slabs of post-rock feedback and trumpet fanfare. “You only like me when I’m sad,” she sweetly sings during a quiet interlude on “Pressed 2 Death,” an otherwise boisterous rambler that’s dotted with kiss-offs and opens with a fart noise.
Tudzin—who is technically Illuminati Hotties’ sole permanent member, although she records with a full band—is a veteran studio rat, and it shows in the album’s dynamic sounds. In addition to working as a production and engineering assistant to big-time indie producer Chris Coady (Beach House, TV on the Radio), she’s logged studio time with acts ranging from Porches to Macklemore and worked on the sound design for the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton. Her expertise gives her own tracks a funhouse-like quality, with an eruption of noise, six-stringed squeal, or purposely lo-fi effect around every corner. Even without knowing that additional vocals on the album are credited to “Everyone at Jesse’s Party,” you get the sense that she had fun making this record.
Tudzin describes the sound of Illuminati Hotties as “tenderpunk,” and that feels right. Every emotional abrasion and pang of longing on Kiss Yr Frenemies is conveyed with just the right mix of sadness and acerbity. On the single “(You’re Better) Than Ever,” she confesses, “All the baddest words I knew came pouring out/When I heard you feel better/Better than ever.” Along with stylistic forebears Los Campesinos!, Tudzin’s sound sometimes recalls indie-pop lifer Rose Melberg’s many projects, as well as 1990s Vancouver punks Cub—all acts that have regularly challenged the common notion that indie pop is all cloying sentiments and bookishly restrained instrumentation.
Kiss Yr Frenemies also shares with those artists a sharp sense of humor, as Tudzin strikes a balance between digging deep for emotional resonance and making comedic hay out of the quotidian details of life and love in 2018. Just before detailing all-night benders and battles with self-doubt against the stuttering drum machines and ambient drones of “Cuff,” she dives into the beery sorta-romance of “Shape of My Hands,” recounting how she blew the her savings at 7/11 and heard a potential paramour quote her lyrics back to her. Money is a frequent concern in Tudzin’s cash-strapped universe. On “Paying Off the Happiness," she admits, “I could probably use a fourth job,” over kicky drum beats that bring to mind Toni Basil’s “Hey Mickey.”
As that lyric suggests, plenty of listeners are sure to find Kiss Yr Frenemies deeply relatable. Beyond her PayPal namechecks and asides about encrypted text messages, the many feelings—love, uncertainty, heartbreak, FOMO, contemplativeness, empathy—Tudzin juggles throughout the album come together to capture the emotional complexity of being a young adult in the current decade. Amid these timely observations, it’s the indie-pop songwriting conventions she lovingly and expertly invokes that make Illuminati Hotties’ confident debut feel timeless.


Each track of the new Pharmakon LP can be heard as a violent scuffle between mind and body. Even when her visceral noise achieves moments of transcendence, it still strikes you in the gut.

Contact

Through a decade of performing and recording as Pharmakon, Margaret Chardiet has made music that heaves, throbs, and decays. Harnessing the drilling power of electronics and the elasticity of her screams, she’s concocted visceral noise in New York since she was a teenager—first on small-run tapes and CD-Rs, then on more widely-available albums for her hometown label Sacred Bones. As her profile has grown, her sound has remained physical, the aural equivalent of organs pumping life into a body while nature takes a toll on its flesh. The physicality of each Pharmakon album emerges in Chardiet’s choices of cover art. Her 2013 LP Abandon showed maggots swarming on her lap, suggesting a theme of bodily decomposition. For 2014’s Bestial Burden—influenced by an illness that required emergency surgery—she placed animal organs on her chest and torso, as if her own innards had broken through her skin.
On the cover of the third Pharmakon full-length, Contact, Chardiet is no longer alone. A mesh of greasy fingers cover her face, her hair tangled in between them like a spiderweb catching flies. Perhaps Contact, then, is about reaching out and connecting with others. Alongside the heavier, more claustrophobic Bestial Burden, this new collection sounds spacious. Chardiet has opened her psychic soundscapes to give the outside world more room to enter. And that’s a well-timed goal, given how current political strife has pushed people to work together rather than turn inward.
In press materials, Chardiet says Contact is about “when our mind uses the body in order to transcend or escape it.” (Or, as she recently expanded, it’s “about stepping outside your experiences as a human and looking at humanity in an objective way.”) The ultimate objective, she writes, is “Empathy! EMPATHY, NOW!” Achieving that isn’t easy. The music on Contact is stressful and tense, rife with conflicts that aren’t always resolved. At one point, Chardiet even seems ready to admit defeat, singing that “Despite all our scrambling rejections/We cannot transcend all of our instincts/Just animals, lost in a confused dream.” But she never gives up. Each track can be heard as a violent scuffle between mind and body, and Chardiet compellingly mines that primal contest for drama and catharsis. The music hammers with industrial heft, vibrates with nervous pulse, and envelops with tactile atmosphere. Even when her songs achieve moments of transcendence, they still strike you directly in the gut.
Contact benefits from Chardiet’s agile voice, which feels more prominent than ever. Her howls and screeches are central to four of the album’s six tracks, naturally humanizing the music while standing strong inside the electronic clatter. On “Nakedness of Need,” ominous noise is shifted by her blasting shrieks, while during “Transmission” her screams bounce around the din like wolves surrounding prey. That song’s lyric comprises just five lines, framing communication as paramount: “I had a conversation/It lasted nearly an hour/Held no words/And carried the weight/Of the state of things so held.”
Chardiet’s sounds are in a constant tug of war on Contact, and that clash seems to be the point. Just as there’s often more to learn from a journey than its destination, for Pharmakon the battle outweighs the result. Perhaps that’s why Contact’s closer, “No Natural Order,” actually resembles a battlefield. Crashes and pounds rattle while Chardiet peals out angry breaths, undaunted by the sonic assault. In the end, her chants could pass for political slogans—“No divine law, escape!/No positive law, revolt!/No natural law pertains:/Only empathy, untamed”—and it sounds like a victory.


Margo Price is a country singer signed to Jack White's Third Man Records. On her highly buzzed debut, she emerges as a woman struggling to reclaim her story from the Nashville machine and reset it in old-school honky-tonk tunes.

Midwest Farmer's Daughter

Margo Price has been gigging hard in Nashville for nearly a decade, earning a reputation as a fierce live act but getting barely any attention from labels or radio programmers. In the last few months, however, her fortunes took an abrupt turn: She signed to Jack White's Third Man Records, debuted on "Colbert," and released a string of hard-drinkin', hard-livin' singles. Even before she releases her debut, Midwest Farmer's Daughter, she has found herself at the center of some of the most intense buzz in country music, which means she has undergone a great deal of scrutiny. Most of it has concentrated on her backstory, which sounds like every country song rolled into one: Dad lost the farm, Nashville screwed her over, she shacked up with a married man, did a brief stint in jail, lost a child. To record this album, she hocked her wedding ring and car to pay for sessions at Memphis' legendary Sun Studios.
She owns up to all of it on her debut's epic six-minute opener "Hands of Time," which tells her own story better than any critic, press release, publicist, TV host, or awards presenter ever could. It's a remarkable cold open, an incredible introduction to an artist who is both a newcomer and a veteran, but what makes it so powerful is the contrast between all the bad shit she's endured and her modest goals for recovery: "All I wanna do is make a little cash." Rather than conquer the world or see her name up in lights, Price just wants get the farm back for her dad and buy her mom a nice bottle of wine.
On Midwest Farmer's Daughter—whose title is clearly meant to echo Loretta Lynn's famous origin story—Price emerges as a woman struggling to reclaim her story from the Nashville machine and reset it in old-school honky-tonk tunes that split the difference between so many ampersands: country & western, rock & roll, rhythm & blues. It's an ambitious piece of music-making and storytelling, featuring a road-hardened backing band called the Price Tags and a singer whose flinty voice conveys both a guarded vulnerability and a reckless scrappiness. She fiddles while Nashville burns on "This Town Gets Around," three minutes of inside baseball that details all the unscrupulous managers and sexist promoters who populate the industry like fleas on a hound. "I guess it's me who gets the joke," she sings. "Maybe I'd be smarter if I played dumb."
On most of Daughter, however, Price is tough in conventional ways, on songs that fit a bit more squarely with country traditions. She threatens a bar patron on the honky-tonk fight song "About to Find Out," drowns the devil on her shoulder with whisky and tequila on "Since You Put Me Down," welcomes a wayward lover on "How the Mighty Have Fallen." They're sturdy tunes, strong examples of the country songwriting, but they don't hit with the same force as the more obviously personal songs here. Daughter is best when it's specifically first-person, when Price bends country to fit her own story rather than bend herself to fit the form. You root hard for Price to win these battles, even as you may find yourself wishing Midwest Farmer's Daughter could transcend the hype.


After a seven year pause, Elizabeth Powell’s new album as Land of Talk still sounds like a direct line to her consciousness, full of unpredictable songwriting twists and poetically opaque lyrics.

Life After Youth

There was a moment shortly after Montreal’s Land of Talk released their last album, 2010’s Cloak and Cipher, when the band’s longevity seemed quietly clear. As the Canadian indie pop boom hit its zenith and receded, something about Land of Talk sounded timeless. Never as bombastic as Arcade Fire or as saccharine as Stars, Land of Talk were more straightforward. Even with Cipher pulling guests from the who’s who of Montreal indie, and Justin Vernon producer credits on 2008’s Some Are Lakes, Land of Talk always managed to sound like a direct line to Elizabeth Powell’s consciousness, like the best-kept-secret of your local basement scene. Seven years later, Powell is back with Life After Youth—a solid, consistent return that sounds like the band never left.
Music, or at least a music career, is often said to be a young person’s game—an economy that relies heavily on a college demographic, touring schedules that take their toll on the mind and body, and a lack of economic stability. This all accumulated for Powell. And after a devastating computer crash destroyed the bulk of her post-Cipher material, her father suffered a stroke, leading Powell to put music on pause and prioritize being his caretaker. Life After Youth, then, could also be called Music After the Grind—Powell coming back to music as a healing and sustaining practice, for both herself and her father. “This Time” has Powell announcing her return: “I don’t want to waste it this time/And see fate as the end of me.”
In true Land of Talk form, that’s about as overt as Powell gets. Snapshots of longing manifest throughout the album: “Yes you were on my mind/Done a lot of distance/I can’t leave you behind,” Powell sings on “Yes You Were;” “The wind undoes me/Pulls me past/The way you hold me/Brings me back,” goes the tender “Inner Lover.” Otherwise, the lyrics stay poetically opaque, generating meaning in how phrases sit together, like how the emotional crux of “Inner Lover” rests in the refrain “You light it slowly/Your light is lonely.”
One of Powell’s biggest songwriting strengths has been its unpredictability. As soon as you think you know where a song is going, it turns and drops you into fresh emotional territory; the fragments part and leave you on a plaintive, gutting line. (This approach is currently best practiced by Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan.) Life After Youth uses some conventional song structures, but it contains choice breakaways. “World Made” interjects stops and starts into an otherwise steadily chugging tempo; “Yes You Were” hits the gas pedal with a visceral restlessness. “Spiritual Intimidation” starts mellow, accelerates on an early bridge and drives right off, catching air in a freefall of whirling synths.
For the most part, though, Life After Youth feels like Land of Talk’s most muted release, built from synth parts and programmed loops rather than guitar. Drums are sparse, even on the louder rock songs, and the production never lets the raw parts land quite right. There’s a brashness that’s missing, replaced with the tenderness that comes with gingerly stepping back into something wounded. Late-2000s Canadian indie pop was never one to throw the brick (except maybe for Metric), but Land of Talk always had something of an uprising within it, smuggling in jabs at the music industry and gender.
Youth is instead concerned with an inwardness, peppered with reassurances that could be directed to Powell’s longing fans, the people in her care, or Powell herself. On the gentle closer “Macabre,” she launches into a singsong verse: “If it wasn’t for this life I would leave it/But oh I’d miss the sky and the sea.” As the old cliches would have it, we’re always the oldest we’ve ever been—but there is in fact life after youth, so long as you make a little space for healing.


The legendary singer and songwriter has her already diverse, malleable career remixed by artists such as Coldcut, Francois K, and DJ Logic.

Remixed and Reimagined

The irony of remix collections like this one is that, while they're ostensibly supposed to bring the artist "up to date" and keep their music alive by merging classic records with new techniques and technologies, the artist so honored always winds up sounding older and deader. Though Nina Simone passed just a few years ago, through much of this set she sounds like her contributions were peeled off of an old 78; absent her usual arrangements, she becomes just another dusty Ghost of Music Past trapped inside some earringed bald guy's machine.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. If records were ever agreed to be holy and beyond the reach of those who like to tinker, those days are long gone. Everything is a work in progress, to be continually repackaged, recontextualized, remastered, and yes, remixed-- legally and otherwise-- again and again. And Nina Simone, who fought hard and bitter fights for control of her art, is gone now, and her vote doesn't count. So you may as well meet a remix set like this in the middle.
The worst tracks here fail because they sound like they're trying to frame Simone as fashionably "cool." When singing, Simone could be pretentious, goofy, sentimental, melodramatic, angry, and compassionate; she almost never looked on at the world from an icy remove. Despite her often-tragic life, she wasn't Chet Baker. Her husky voice and sometimes behind-the-beat phrasing obviously serve as downtempo touchstones, but when given a trip-hop backing on Daniel Y's "I Can't See Nobody" or Coldcut's neo-big beat "Save Me", she's reduced to a cardboard cut-out, propped up in front as a one-dimensional caricature. And while she was to my ears perhaps the sexiest vocalist that ever lived, immersed in DJ Wally's mix on "My Man's Gone Now", she comes over as "sexy" in the manner of an airbrushed babe from a Skyy Vodka ad.
I do, however, have to give it up for Tony Humphries' "Got U Turned on Dub" remix of "Turn Me On". Enlivened by a snippet of sampled scat vocal and a bubblicious house beat, he alone finds the overflowing life that propelled Simone's best recordings. It's almost eight minutes long but has enough joy and generosity to go another five, easy. And while I'm not crazy about the reverb Francois K. puts on Simone's voice on his mix of "Here Comes the Sun"-- a stylization that homogenizes the most distinctive of instruments-- the delicate arrangement and beat he stretches behind her have a certain charm. Behind those two, there are another two or three OK tracks, and the remainder of the record is pretty dire. Sad to say, it could have been worse.


The Australian hitmaker’s 10th studio album is an overproduced amalgamation of disco, hip-hop, and radio pop that even Sia’s gale-force delivery can only carry so far.

Reasonable Woman

Sia’s voice is a titanic instrument that swerves between sorrow and euphoria in the same octave-spanning measure. Since her 2014 breakthrough, 1000 Forms of Fear, the Australian star’s career has spanned big-ticket electropop collaborations with the likes of Diplo, Zayn, Flo Rida, and Sean Paul, as well as her own passion projects. Over the past decade, her sound fully morphed from the quietly crushing indie pop of early records to produce glossy mainstream hits, including both giddy highs and some forgettable lows. Reasonable Woman, the singer’s 10th studio album, continues the trend of inconsistency. Over manicured synth arrangements and beat drops blown up to eye-watering proportions, Sia belts out self-help anthems that stick to formulaic, dated sounds. It’s outsized feel-good music with little worth feeling good about.
Reasonable Woman follows 2021’s Music, the soundtrack to the singer’s misguided directorial debut of the same name. Both a critical and commercial flop, Music might suggest that Sia has something to prove. Yet few songs on Reasonable Woman summon the concentrated adrenaline and idiosyncratic lyrics that animate her best music. (Even the tepid title makes it feel as though she’s managing expectations upfront.) The chorus that’s meant to juice up motivational opener “Little Wing” weds Sia’s grandiose vocals to basic lyrics: “My little wing/I know you can’t stop crying/But tears dry up when you’re flying,” she sings in a soaring upper register, sounding as though she’s still scoring a forgettable film. On the more memorable ballad “I Had a Heart,” co-written with Rosalía, she reaches deeper, and her unvarnished performance revels in the weathered grain of her voice. Dealing out forgiveness after a breakup, she relinquishes some of the album’s pomp and gradually finds a more moving, if still treacly, sweet spot.
More often, pomp seems to be the point. Reasonable Woman is an overproduced amalgamation of disco, hip-hop, and radio pop that even Sia’s gale-force delivery can only carry so far. The wobbly dubstep drop on the anonymous single “Incredible,” featuring Sia’s LSD partner Labrinth, sounds teleported from 2014. The stomping, rafters-aiming “Gimme Love” grates as it makes the titular request 12 times in a chorus. Chaka Khan’s verses on the souped-up, Greg Kurstin-produced “Immortal Queen” are so incomprehensible they’re almost camp, combining references to The Matrix, “cavemen bringing the cave queen carvings,” and Queens Victoria and Sheba. It makes no more sense in context, ping-ponging between uninspired synth arpeggios, than it does on paper. And on the truly dire Paris Hilton duet “Fame Won’t Love You,” Sia delivers achingly sincere lyrics about the trials of celebrity beside one of Y2K’s most flavorless personalities. The guitar-tinged synth-pop feels airless. There’s no forward motion, no tension—both key to the rapturous feelings evoked by Sia’s most energetic, soaring songs.
She finds a more worthy match in Kylie Minogue on the breathy, strutting “Dance Alone,” an electropop highlight that shares DNA with Minogue’s recent Tension and readily invites comparison to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” still the gold standard for this particular flavor of bittersweet bliss. It’s an issue that plagues Reasonable Woman: The germ of a better idea often appears within reach. That’s true of songs like the pleasure-seeking “One Night,” where bizarre, Timbaland-esque rhythmic strings propose a more interesting angle on swaggering dance-R&B. It happens again on the closing ballad “Rock and Balloon,” with the simple, metronomic synth that winds through the background and finally dissipates into an acoustic guitar melody. Those wrinkles of strangeness—whether in production, vocals, or instrumentation—are traces of a stronger album that the incoherent Reasonable Woman quickly abandons for the next drop.


The former Odd Future rapper’s latest solo EP shows his strengths but ultimately loses steam due to his basic bars and formless lyrics.

Entitled

At the beginning of his career, Hodgy was an able foil. Odd Future was a collective full of rap hellions intent on pushing boundaries as often as they pushed clothing covered in cats, but even within that hectic framework, Hodgy’s voice was always recognizable. The higher register of his voice stuck out next to the deeper rasps of Tyler, The Creator and Domo Genesis, giving each verse a sense of urgency, even if his bars weren’t particularly impressive. Much of the thrill of verses like his Tumblr-referencing breakthrough on “Sandwitches” or the first lines of “Loaded”—a standout from he and producer Left Brain’s duo MellowHype—came from the slickness of his words, how they’d contrast with the richer timbres of his collaborators or the spacey beats of the production.
But as he moved on to solo work, his abilities began to wane. After a number of mixtapes, he released his 2016 “debut” Fireplace: TheNotTheOtherSide, which featured bursts of strong rapping and singing tied to indistinct writing. For all the gusto of his marathon-like flow on “Final Hour” or his ballooning voice on “Resurrection,” it felt like anyone could’ve written most of these songs. This remains the problem on his latest EP Entitled, which shows he’s still a decent performer without telling us why we should care. It is a tighter and more focused experience than Fireplace, but only by virtue of it being five songs long instead of 13.
That lack of focus is ironic considering the track titles spell out a declarative sentence: “Every day, people change into someone we never knew again.” Whether this is some sort of meta-commentary or just a whoa, dude weedism, the thinness of his lyrics don’t do his singing or rapping any favors. While Hodgy switches between both modes with technical flair, bars like “Every day I’m on my grind like a skateboarder/I’m a g, I’m on my rind like a shaved orange” from opener “Everyday” are dead on arrival. Rappers have built entire aesthetics around selling punchlines— Roc Marciano and Pi’erre Bourne are pros at this—but theirs are attached to stories, a distinct worldview that doubles as a glimpse at their personality. Try as he might, empty lines like “Complex like the magazine” from “People Change” don’t have the same mileage.
As a comic rapper, Hodgy’s bars are stale and basic. On top of being unfunny, his lyrics lack detail, a sense of place or geography, or a definite personality to bolster him when he starts telling stories. He comes close a few times with stray nods to Anita Baker songs (“Into Someone”) and the energetic verse that closes out “People Change.” But these fleeting moments quickly dissolve. The love songs lack longing and chemistry, leaning on tired metaphors like “hanging like ornaments” and shallow talk of experiences that never dives into what those experiences might mean. At their most serious, they sound like unfinished campfire sing-alongs.
Which is a shame because Entitled also features what are effectively two MellowHype reunion tracks. Left Brain’s beats on “People Change” and “We Never Knew” mix the haze of early 2010s cloud rap with whizzing drums and synths that expand and swirl like quasars, and Hodgy navigates them effortlessly. It’s almost enough to make you want a new MellowHype project, if only Hodgy would flesh out his writing. Entitled feels like an attempted course correction after a slow few years, but the project doesn’t fail because it’s offensive or poorly arranged. Simply, Hodgy sounds like a bored hype-man with nothing to say.


Now on his own label, the internet rap originator explores all his favorite styles—warbling rap, theatrical rock and pop—and the results are consistently joyous.

My Parade

Year after year, successive generations of internet rap further confirm that iLoveMakonnen is an originator. Hyperpop and digicore artists get praised for mashing together rap with other genres on a whim; Makonnen was making songs that sounded like Gucci Mane and MGMT in 2011. Mario Judah goes viral for crooning over rap beats like an opera singer; Makonnen did that in 2014. “Panini” by Lil Nas X—everything by Lil Nas X, to be honest—feels indebted to Makonnen’s bubbly melodies and vocal approach.
Makonnen’s version of internet rap was unlike anyone before him. His early Drink More Water tapes, largely self-produced, were strange and muddy and gripped by a deep curiosity, full of sketches of rap, electro-pop, and indie rock. On paper, they looked like the work of a hitmaker, which is why the industry took interest in him. But after “Tuesday,” and after signing with Drake’s OVO Sound in 2014, Makonnen largely receded from the spotlight—partly because his music was always too weird for radio, partly because labels never cared to invest in him. It didn’t help that most of his star rap collaborators distanced themselves after he came out as a gay man in 2017. (It’s telling that just a couple years later, the Black online teen who hit No. 1 with “Old Town Road” was more embraced by fans and the industry for coming out.)
Maybe Makonnen just needed to escape from all that noise. He did in real life, moving to Portland, Oregon in 2016, and now he’s done so artistically. After a near-decade with Warner, he’s gone and started his own label and released his first independent album, My Parade. It’s a natural continuation and refinement of the styles he’s grown fond of over the years, with a little less rapping and a little more singing. Makonnen rarely compromises his vision, sequencing warbling rap songs alongside the indie rock and folk experiments he’s toyed with for a decade. These are some of his most fleshed-out ideas, and the results are consistently joyous. The single “Whoopsy” lurches around synthetic flutes and 808s and Makonnen yelps the title, sounding like a siren, before passing it off to a rapper named Payday who demolishes her verse.
On “Whoopsy” and elsewhere, Makonnen demonstrates his knack for rolling words around and making them sound three-dimensional. His elastic, buoyant voice transforms relatively mundane phrases into mantras. He could just tell you he’s sexy, but he’d rather squeal “I’m2sexyI’m2sexyI’m2HOT!”, the syllables floating overhead like loosed balloons.
Makonnen tends to throw everything at the wall, which usually leads to a few duds. But on My Parade, he moves briskly through styles. He’s a bit more reserved, which makes the record smoother than some of his mixtape work, but it also leads to greyer stretches, or staid rap cuts like “So Saucy” and “Whip It Harder” where he isn’t doing much. He thankfully follows those up with the yawning “Bad Bitch With a Stutter,” a glacial club record made warmer by its ridiculous, self-evident premise.
The thing is, “Bad Bitch With a Stutter” is also a song about longing, and longing is Makonnen’s wellspring—no one is better at injecting funny, meandering songs with heart and humanity. On his indie rock and folk numbers, Makonnen writes in big, theatrical flourishes. “You could be ‘cross the ocean, somewhere in the blue/ I'll be all alone searching for you,” he warbles on the gorgeous “If It’s Cool,” which saunters at the pace of a Tame Impala song. These are ideas he might’ve tried on past tapes, but here they’re full-bodied, aided by stronger beats and cleaner mixes.
The range of production allows Makonnen to express himself better and open up more, like on the grungy title track, where he acknowledges all the hardship that’s come his way over the years: the deaths of some of his closest friends, the hearts he’s shattered, the living hell that is working for someone who doesn’t care about you. It’s sad but also defiant, a moment of agency: “Why should I keep waiting around if it's just gon’ be raining now?” My Parade takes that line to heart and grins wide in response. The DNA and doll head are still there, but Makonnen’s older, surer of himself, freer than ever.

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The musical output of Michelle Branch and Patrick Carney’s embattled partnership suffers from muddled songwriting and meandering arrangements.

The Trouble With Fever

The enduring image of Michelle Branch is that of a young woman holding a guitar, fixing you with an open stare, and daring you to look back. In TRL days, she was photographed in empty lofts and alongside desert blacktops, dressed like an all-American rocker with nods to her Southwestern roots. This image projected a frankness rare among teenage pop stars, even if it didn’t quite capture the appeal of her early work. For all their hooks, bridges, and I’m-sinking-slowly-so-hurry-hold-mes, 2001’s The Spirit Room and 2003’s Hotel Paper are entrancing guitar-pop records, bolstered by Branch’s second-person immediacy and producer John Shanks’ sleek execution. (The striking pre-chorus of “Everywhere,” where the verse structure veers off-key into the stop-start hook, is Shanks’ signature—seen elsewhere on “Come Clean,” “Have a Nice Day,” and “Pieces of Me.”)
Branch’s stardom was as brief as it was sudden. Hotel Paper landed a week before her 20th birthday; Warner sat on the follow-up, cycled Branch through the Nashville machine, and eventually dropped her. Shanks returned for 2010’s Everything Comes and Goes EP, and co-wrote a track on Branch’s 2017 comeback Hopeless Romantic. In the interim, she found a new songwriting partner. After meeting Patrick Carney at a party thrown by his then-wife in 2015, Branch and the Black Keys drummer agreed to work on a batch of unproduced songs. A year later they were a couple, and after marrying in 2019, they returned to the studio for Branch’s fourth full-length. Weeks before The Trouble With Fever’s scheduled release, the bottom fell out: Branch was arrested on a since-dismissed domestic assault charge and filed for divorce before agreeing to attempt reconciliation.
Meanwhile Branch is promoting the musical output of their embattled partnership, a long-simmering album co-written and co-produced by Carney. Fever is such a comprehensive blunder, it’s hard not to search for cracks in the couple’s working relationship. Lead single “I’m a Man,” a would-be anthem from the Carrie Underwood school of revenge feminism, lampoons its male narrator with sardonic framing: “I’m a man/And I’m ready to go/And I can’t get it up/And I can’t let it show.”
No points for subtlety, but fair enough. That’s until Branch abandons the bit, shifting to a woman’s perspective for the second verse: “I’m so tired of being told by everybody/That I can’t make decisions ’bout my own damn body.” The hook is unmelodic, the guitars sound like kazoos, and the violin breakdown is bafflingly out-of-place. Here is a sendup of male impotence, composed and recorded with the husband Branch nearly sent packing. You couldn’t write this stuff! Unfortunately, neither can they—as a protest song it’s jumbled, with none of Hotel Paper’s snarling bite.
Listening to Fever’s lurching arrangements, the question must be asked: Has Patrick Carney ever heard a Michelle Branch song? Even if country-pop isn’t his comfort zone, Branch is a compelling vocalist capable of wary plaintiveness and blistering rancor, effecting a humane intimacy even when her lyrics trend unspecific. She can do bluesy twang and canyon-rock jangle, but the slinky Europop of “Zut Alors!” would’ve been a stretch even for Madonna. The verses (“I get the feeling that we’re on them drugs/And what will happen when it’s not enough?”) are as inane as the swirling disco strings; it’s like Dua Lipa on downers. The unabashed come-ons of “Beating on the Outside” are the album’s lyrical nadir, beginning with the opening bars’ entreaty: “I wanna get you off/I wanna see your face.”
The album isn’t bold enough to commit in any one direction, offsetting whispery synth-pop with saccharine country ballads. Still, the most glaring structural defects are overarching. The dressed-up guitars range from staticky to syrupy; the arrangements meander into melodramatic bridges. The synthetic percussion and modest chord progressions make for a chamber-pop ponderousness. (Has a world-renowned drummer ever been so enamored by chintzy drum machines?) In lieu of hooks, Branch sings wordless, ooh-ooh-ooh harmonies, like vocal reference tracks left intact.
Some of these songs might have been salvaged if not for their bewildering instrumentation. It’s hard to tell where the guitars end and the keys begin in the sludgy wall of sound on “I’m Sorry.” With abrasive synths and spaced-out percussion, “You Got Me Where You Want Me” feels at once too busy and too sparse. The keeper is “Closest Thing to Heaven,” a midtempo ballad with cozy, plainspoken lyrics. The quiet intro spotlights Branch’s burnished voice, picking up momentum en route to the first chorus, but a succession of extraneous instrumental breaks distracts from the easy melody. A more sure-handed producer would have honed in on the chords and the epistolary quality of Branch’s verses. There’s a really nice song here, buried in over-produced schmaltz.
If history remembered Branch as a layover between Liz Phair and Avril Lavigne—or worse, a peer of Hilary Duff and Ashlee Simpson—it wouldn’t do justice to her broader catalog. Hopeless Romantic glimpsed a future in genre work with a distinctive set of woozy, ’70s-inspired rock tunes; with any luck, Fever will be the aberration. When a creative-slash-romantic partnership goes south, you might get Rumours, proof of art’s capacity to transcend animosity. More likely, you’ll get a mishmash like The Trouble with Fever: jaded lovers grappling for space.


The Cure's 1989 album, released during what was arguably the band's peak period, receives a lavish reissue with some terrific bonus material

The Cure: Disintegration [Deluxe Edition]

Disintegration [Deluxe Edition]

The late 1980s and early 90s were the Cure’s heyday—from an American perspective. It’s not just that they were making great music; they’d been making great music for roughly a decade already. But these were the years during which they coalesced into this whole iconic thing, the Cure—a sound, a look, and a sensibility that a few kids in every other high school could build whole identities around. Or at least whole wardrobes, decoration schemes, and notebook scribbles. One of my first big memories of listening to Disintegration involves wandering around the Colorado State Fair, from the agriculture show to the gang fights by the midway. This is a kind of reach I doubt Robert Smith ever imagined.
And yet there they were. You could say—again, from an American perspective—that it started with two things. There was Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, a 1987 double album that scatters in a lot of different directions. This is something the band always did well: listening to their “many moods” pop records is like exploring a new city, where every storefront and side street offers something unique. The same went for Standing on a Beach / Staring at the Sea, a collection of singles stretching from 1978 to 1985, that was critical to introducing this band to North Americans.
But mostly there was Disintegration: the record where Robert Smith approached turning 30, got engaged and then married, got annoyed with the way his band was working, and went off by himself to write something deep and serious. Disintegration does not “scatter.” It’s a single, grand, dense, continual, epic trip into core stuff the Cure did well. They’d always been good at this kind of album, too. If Kiss Me is a crowded, teeming city to explore, listening to Disintegration is more like standing in the middle of some vast, empty space—the kind of ocean or plain where you can see the horizon in all directions. You can sense that focus straight from the first minute, during which some wind chimes knock around in an empty void, and then the band bursts out with one of the most overwhelmingly grand openings I’ve ever heard on a pop record—a slow-motion, radiant synth figure of such scale that Sofia Coppola has plausibly used it to soundtrack the coronation of Louis XVI.
It’s no wonder this was meaningful to a lot of teenagers: The sheer emotional grandeur of tracks like that opener, “Plainsong,” make a great match for the feeling that everything in your life is all-consumingly important, whether it’s your all-consuming sadness, joy, longing, or whatever. And yet Disintegration is not a very teenagey album. It’s not an emo whine, and it’s not a big miserablist mope, either; one of its most popular tracks, “Lovesong,” was written by Smith as a wedding present for his wife. “I will always love you,” it keeps promising—not the way you sing that in a giddy love song, but like it’s a grave, solemn, bloody commitment. It was a top 10 hit in the U.S.
This is the thing: The album has a reputation as some huge, dark, crushingly depressive experience. It’s not entirely unearned. If you want to be crushingly depressed with Disintegration, or frustrated, or self-loathing, it’ll embrace you right back. But it’ll embrace other things, too. A whole lot of this album’s appeal is that it’s comforting, practically womblike—big, warm, slow, full of beauty and melody and even joy. The trick, I think, is how well it serves as a soundtrack to that feeling that everything around you is meaningful, whether it’s beautiful or horrible or sublime: This is an album for capital-R Romantics, not sulkers. It’s muscular (like on the title track), wistful (“Pictures of You”), ghostly (“Closedown”), seething (“Fascination Street”), and yeah, morose, but what’s striking is how each of those qualities can reach really, really far into your gut. It’s not a record for the dead-inside: Get far enough into this album, and I will almost guarantee you will feel some shit.
It’s monolithic, and most of the songs work the same way. A lot of them are mostly “intro”: The steady pulse of bass and guitar underneath, while glacially huge synth lines and liquid guitar melodies sparkle through the foreground. After a while, Smith’s voice comes in, echoing calmly, surveying the ocean around him. On Kiss Me he yowled and croaked and had fun with it, but he spends the length of this album turning in tense, restrained performances, calm and steely and grave. The parts where he actually lets loose and starts raving are explosive. The title track, for instance, plunges further and further into a frustrated wail before climaxing on one phrase: “Both of us knew/How the end always is.” (You can take that climax as harrowing or cathartic or just plain fun.) Songs like this aren’t organized around parts and movements, just steady repetition and emotional build. So at some point you realize that the intros aren’t really “intros,” not just a period of waiting for things to start: sinking into the sound of this album—a sound whose every element feels huge and magnificent—is the whole point.
And that, to be honest, is the one drawback of this reissue. If I’m remembering correctly, the first pressings of Disintegration actually said, in the liner notes, “this album was mixed to be played loud, so turn it up.” It was intentionally created with headroom to spare, and designed to be full of space—every instrument surrounded by air, every echo trail clear and audible, an album that was above all comfortable to listen to. Like most remasters these days, this one has to pump up the volume toward modern levels, which means smushing things together and making parts fight for space. I’m not so cranky that this usually bothers me, but this is one album where it might really eat away at the point—those horizons you used to be able to see in all directions have been moved miles closer.
On the plus side, there’s the rest of the package. Previous reissues in this series have included home demos that felt more like curiosities than anything useful. But the ones here are enlightening; it's marvelous to hear them and consider how Smith’s instrumental sketches came together into anything as complete as this record. (You can also chuckle at the cheery-sounding ones that obviously got axed along the way.) With this package, in fact, you can go from home demos to studio ones, from studio demos to the album, and then from the album to the third disc—1989 live recordings of each track, in order. And where are these “crushingly depressive” ghouls playing them? At Wembley Arena, in front of more than 10,000 people.


The songwriter’s self-produced second LP is an introduction to the psyche beneath the quirky bowl cut. But its self-imposed pop formulas and strained symbolism reveal little.

Orca

Gus Dapperton: e-boy archetype, Porches lookalike, bedroom pop artist, post-Tumblr aesthete, TikTok native. He is a mood board, Gen Z culture personified. Over the past few years, the Brooklyn-based 23-year-old and his class of fellow online alterna-pop artists with colorful hair have developed an aesthetic: light, hazy synth tunes that blur into fans’ lives and Spotify algorithms. His smooth, sunny pop songs address modern anxieties in ways that feel direct and relatable, simple to the point of monotony. Dapperton’s two EPs and 2019 debut full-length garnered a young cult following that grew with his feature on BENEE’s “Supalonely,” a 2020 TikTok hit that climbed the Billboard charts. But musical identity was secondary to Dapperton’s rise, which seemed to hinge on easy listening and a trendy persona. Dapperton looks like Brooklyn to people who’ve never been to Brooklyn. He looks like a rock star to fashion insiders. He looks cool to teenagers. And he sounds like anybody. Orca, his self-produced second LP, is an introduction to the psyche beneath the quirky bowl cut. Unfortunately, it fails to answer some key questions—namely, who is Gus Dapperton and what is he trying to be?
A newfound honesty and ease runs through Orca’s reflections on depression. You can hear him becoming more comfortable with his voice, stretching it beyond a nasally croon. Still, his personality remains hidden, and it’s hard to discern what he’s going for. “Bluebird”’s swaggering bassline feels goofy and forced against Dapperton’s bratty drone: “I’m young and I’m never getting old/That’s my human right.” “My Say So” lands somewhere between Top 40 hit, schoolyard chant, and fictional Disney Channel band as Dapperton and Australian singer Chela bop along to xylophone scales: “My say so still says the same/So I say so in different ways.”
His most successful lines either appeal to a quick-pulsed adolescent nihilism, or are made to sound significant by attention-grabbing production choices. “I’m too atheist to pray for my life,” Dapperton moans on “First Aid,” arguably the best track on Orca. A phrase as inane as “I love it when you cuss” ignites when it’s pummeled by drums on “Grim.” But the album’s emptier arrangements expose contrived poetics. “Though books of Dawkins seem to think that we are through,” he pronounces on “Swan Song,” apparently having just finished The God Delusion. Dapperton tries on words like “apostacize” and metaphors about broken cameras, speaking as “the product of a crowded youth...strictly cavalier inside.” The flowery language doesn’t fit his mild pop flavor, and the shots at intellectual depth hardly register.
Bedroom pop lends itself to a solitary environment, while anthemic radio pop usually requires more people in the room. Dapperton writes, records, and produces all of his own music; aside from some mixing, mastering, and guest vocalists’ harmonizing, Orca is a one-man production. And as he attempts to polish and sharpen the genre, his source material gets lost in translation. Dapperton sacrifices grainy intimacy in favor of a more accessible singer-songwriter style, settling closer to the adult contemporary umbrella that stretches over artists like Ed Sheeran and Khalid. Flashes of gauzy Mac DeMarco guitars and emo cadences read like not-so-subtle reminders of unearned indie street cred. It’s all very calculated, but it doesn’t quite add up.
Dapperton’s potential shines when he pushes himself, when it sounds like he’s making music for self-expression and fun, expanding his vocal range and messing around with reverb. He loses it inside of self-imposed pop formulas and strained symbolism. Certain beats just work better in a seconds-long TikTok dance routine than on headphones. Like many young artists today, Dapperton is under pressure to strike the mood of the moment and achieve virality—to sustain a feedback loop of recommended content. Pop music worked this way long before social media, but as musicians and audiences bend to the will of the feed, the overemphasis on aesthetics feels increasingly pervasive.
According to a recent interview, Dapperton’s most treasured albums include the Smiths compilation Hatful of Hollow, Oasis’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago. This collection makes sense on the surface: three classics of sad-boy rock that look great on a gallery wall. But beyond their covers, each is an example of artists experimenting with sound and vulnerability early in their discography. Maybe, if Dapperton spent more time absorbing and workshopping the ideas that turned his inspirations into phenomenons, he would unlock what sets him apart.

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On an interconnected suite of pieces for pipe organ, brass ensemble, and chamber choir, the composer balances minimalist intensity with sacred music’s depth of feeling.

All Life Long

A held chord on a pipe organ can signal a looming arrival—of a Boris Karloff character or, in a brighter register, the bride-to-be. Such a stately chord encapsulates anticipation. It makes its listener cognizant of waiting, because the instrument can sustain such a chord forever. That is how pipe organs function, and it is one reason they are perfect for churchly representations of heavenly—that is, eternal—choruses.
By contrast, if you hear a sustained note on a piano or saxophone, let alone sung by a singer, you know it has a finite lifespan: until the instrument—or lungs—give way. The limitless sustain of an organ is an innate superpower. Since you sense the organ’s stamina is inexhaustible, you know the player has complete discretion as to when whatever happens next will … actually … occur.
When that musician is Kali Malone, be prepared to wait—and, following momentary activity, to wait again. Malone is a poet of attenuation. The compositions on All Life Long proceed at the considered pace of a chess-by-mail match. Each step is a marker of choices made. As a listener, you pay attention not just to those steps but to the overtones that fill the air in between. Each chord is a burr of wonderment. To listen closely is to find compositions within, as waveforms meld, tones circle, and patterns shift with a dynamism initially belied by the seeming stasis.
You’ve heard of forest bathing? Welcome to cathedral bathing, to the dark romance of the steady descents amid “Fastened Maze,” and to the methodical harmonic brick-laying of “Prisoned on Watery Shore.” Malone’s organ works can feel as if she is spelunking through cavernous frequencies, seeking to understand just how far the darkness extends. She maps territory fastidiously, and then serves up her field work in composition form. At the most extreme, she might finish a song—in this case, the title track—by holding its closing chord for more than a full minute. (One foresees the inevitable scandale when a Spotify bot accidentally eradicates such a track as part of its war on white noise.) Even when Malone’s compositions adopt a more human timescale, as on “Moving Forward,” the impact is heady.
Stephen O’Malley, of doom-metal band Sunn O))), accompanies Malone on the album, which is released by his record label Ideologic Organ. The pairing makes perfect sense: The two share penchants for dense harmonies, exotic tunings, and ceremonial grandeur. It is a sign of Malone’s decade-long maturation as an artist that, at 30, she has come to make practical use of the drones that she once let unfurl on their own. The wooly sawtooth waves that filled out last year’s Does Spring Hide Its Joy brought to mind the raga-inspired tonalities of La Monte Young. Here they are raw material for more traditional, if still funereal, compositions. Malone’s latest work challenges today’s drone musicians to retain the delectable, psychedelic whir of drones while using them in the service of something melodically engaging.
All Life Long is not all pipe organs. The album rotates through organ, choir, and brass ensemble. The works for voice suggest the 16th-century polyphony of Palestrina. “Passage Through the Spheres” opens with one singer panned all the way to the right; shortly after another singer enters from the left. The voices alternately reflect, presage, and complete each other’s lines. The exaggerated stereo separation signals Malone’s camaraderie with Janet Cardiff’s landmark sound-art installation featuring the music of Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, 40 Part Motet, which uses individual, freestanding speakers for each of its titular vocal lines, allowing the listener to walk among what is, in effect, a choir of ghosts.
While Malone has employed horns in the past, as on 2018’s Cast of Mind and 2022’s Living Torch, that was in service of drones—chamber instruments as synthesizer modules, in a manner of speaking. On All Life Long, she is truly writing for brass ensemble, yielding a regal quality: less goth, more Sun King (minus the filigree of the Baroque era). In particular, elegant horns on tracks like “Retrograde Cannon” and “Formation Flight” echo the dignified arrangements of David Byrne’s The Knee Plays, music the Talking Heads cofounder composed for Robert Wilson’s opera the CIVIL warS. In Malone’s and Byrne’s pieces alike, you can hear modern sensibilities merging with antiquated techniques.
Malone does inquisitive listeners a favor by repeating two works in different forms. The title piece, first played on organ, appears toward the end of All Life Long in a voice setting that seems quicker, less ethereal. The second version also reveals the source of the album’s title, a mournful poem, “The Crying Water,” by 20th-century Welsh literary figure Arthur Symons. “No Sun to Burn” is performed first by brass, with enthralling high points, and then later on organ, more delicate and tenuous.
Malone is among a cadre of 21st-century musicians breathing new life into organs. Others include Olivia Block, Robert Curgenven, Sarah Davachi, Lawrence English, FUJI|||||||||||TA, and Claire M Singer. They do so coincident with the ongoing deconsecration of many churches. Malone has acknowledged this tension in pieces like “Sacer Profanare,” from 2019’s The Sacrificial Code. It’s a risky endeavor; were her music not so moving, it might invite accusations of purloined gravitas. The addition of vocal polyphony on All Life Long intensifies Malone’s engagement with such liturgical themes, and she nudges the matter further with her text selection for “Passage Through the Spheres.” Sung in Italian, it could be mistaken for a Vatican homily, but it is quite the contrary. The source is an essay by philosopher Giorgio Agamben that quotes Trebatius Testa, a 1st-century BC Roman jurist, on the topic of perceived irreligiosity: “In the strict sense, profane is the term for something that was once sacred or religious and is returned to the use and property of men.” The deeply felt lesson of All Life Long is that secular deployment of such resources can itself be a fount of beauty, reflection, and perhaps even revelation.


Ty Segall is on a tear. Slaughterhouse may be his heaviest and loudest album, but its extra heft doesn't come at the expense of Segall's melodic gifts and  Nuggets-schooled economy.

Slaughterhouse

Nearly 40 years on from their initial, unceremonious flameout, the Stooges have been thoroughly absorbed and accepted into the pop-cultural mainstream in ways that would've seemed nigh unimaginable in the early 1970s. Beyond blazing the trail for punk and the subgenres that arose in its wake, their songs have been covered by stadium-rock giants, featured in videogames, successfully mashed-up with Salt N Pepa, soundtracked Kristen Stewart/Dakota Fanning make-out scenes in big-screen biopics, and used to sell Chryslers. But it's no coincidence that all of these middlebrow appropriations draw from the band's 1969 self-titled debut and 1973's Raw Power-- by Stooges standards, the albums you're most likely to reach for when entertaining house guests.
The band's infamous 1970 sophomore release, Fun House, has remained largely undisturbed by the music supervisors of the world, because, as even casual Stooges fans know, you just don't fuck with Fun House. It isn't simply a collection of classic proto-punk songs, it's a very real, physical, suffocating space. It's an album in which you get locked and trapped, and from which you reemerge a different person. Over the course of its 36 minutes, Iggy Pop's temperament is gradually debased from the cocksure swagger of opener "Down on the Street" to the screaming, strait-jacketed psychosis of the closing "L.A. Blues". It's an album that even one of the most absurdly over-the-top box sets in rock history couldn't decode or demystify.
But if Fun House is like that creepy dilapidated domicile at the end of the street, the Ty Segall Band are the neighborhood punks who break into it late at night just for kicks, spray paint the walls, and leave behind a small mountain of empty beer cans. Now, the Ty Segall Band are not the Stooges; their full-throttle, pedal-squashing thrust makes no allowances for the Stooges' underrated sense of groove and funk, and Segall is way more of a sucker for pop melody than Iggy ever was. But Slaughterhouse sees them redrafting the Fun House floor plan for their own devious devices: there's that evocative title, for one, and the fact that both albums end with extended, free-form noise meltdowns (in Segall's case, the self-explanatory "Fuzz War"). But most of all, they've vividly captured Fun House's unapologetic griminess, blast-furnace heat, and panic attack-inducing lack of oxygen.
Slaughterhouse is also the closest thing to a concept album we've heard from Segall, whose reputation has been built upon on a ceaseless stream of releases born of a hyperactive whimsy. And where the Lennon-like turns on 2011's Drag City debut, Goodbye Bread, suggested Segall was following a similar pop-leaning path to garage-reared peers like Smith Westerns, Black Lips, and the late Jay Reatard, it was answered earlier this year by a wiggy, scatterbrained collaboration with psych-folkie White Fence. But on Slaughterhouse, Segall's impulsiveness yields to a holistic aesthetic. Segall has described it as "evil space rock" in interviews, but Slaughterhouse feels more subterranean and animalistic than that descriptor suggests. This is an album that opens with a scorching double-shot of Motor City-burning rave-ups ("Death" and "I Bought My Eyes") and a title track that recalls Nirvana with a serious case of Tourette's, and then just gets faster, heavier, and nastier as it progresses; even the withering mid-album sludgefeast "Wave Goodbye" eventually intensifies into a fiercely militaristic, machine-gunned finale. (Only a crazed, abruptly terminated cover of the Bo Diddley/Captain Beefheart standard "Diddy Wah Diddy"-- which ends with Segall screaming "fuck this fucking song!" before admitting with a laugh, "I don't know what we're doing!"-- breaks the album's sinister spell.)
Remarkably, Slaughterhouse's extra heft doesn't come at the expense of Segall's melodic gifts and Nuggets-schooled economy. It's one thing to be heavy, and it's another thing to be hooky, but Slaughterhouse is the rare garage-rock album to do both so well simultaneously: the hopped-up harmonies of "Tell Me What's Inside Your Heart" sound like Hamburg-era Beatles on a particularly potent amphetamines binge, and even the sewer-soaked cover of the Fred Neil-via-The Fabs oldie "That's the Bag I'm In" can't obscure it's righteous chorus. But Slaughterhouse's surprising bounty of crust-covered pop hooks doesn't so much temper the album's ferocious attack as adrenalize the Ty Segall Band's performances to lightning-fast, bloodletting extremes. Which makes the aforementioned "Fuzz War" the only logical way to bring the album's careening momentum to a halt. Comprising 10 minutes of ominous feedback drones and hailstorm drum rattles, the colossal closer proves to be less guitar-carnage climax than scorched-earth aftermath, an opportunity to tally up the body count and mop up the entrails. But while "Fuzz War" may be an uncharacteristic moment of excess on another otherwise lean and mean album, it reinforces the idea of Slaughterhouse as a real place to get lost in-- and the only way out is through the killing floor.


The gifted Chicago singer-songwriter and self-identified outsider artist makes his full-length debut with an often impressive collection of home-recorded material from the last several years.

Acousmatic Sorcery

It's hard to stand out in the world of independent music. "College Grad Moves to Fashionable Urban Enclave and Starts a Garage Rock Band" isn't the most compelling headline, regardless of whether the music is any good. How do you get people to pay attention? One common method in the last couple of years has been to swaddle your music in the gauze of "mystery": no bio, no photos, a cryptic name that puts the artist one step ahead of the engineers writing Google's search algorithms. Another is to actually live an unusual life before you first sit down with a publicist to write a press release. This is the path of Chicago's Willis Earl Beal.
Before news came earlier this year that he'd signed to a subsidiary of indie giant XL, very few people outside of Chicago had heard of Beal. A profile in the Chicago Reader from July of last year told the story of a 27-year-old African-American man who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, had been in the Army, lived with his grandmother, bummed around Albuquerque, and sometimes left CD-Rs of his music in random places. He was a visual artist who had drawn the attention of Found Magazine. He printed his phone number on flyers and invited people to call him and he would sing them a song. He busked a capella on El platforms. After the news came that he'd signed to XL, we discovered that he had auditioned the reality television show "The X Factor". Add it all up and the urge to ask, "What's the deal with this guy?" is overwhelming.
Beal's debut album, Acousmatic Sorcery, which consists of of home-recorded songs stretching back over the last few years, doesn't answer this question. But it does suggest that the answer, when it finally comes, may well be fascinating. The first thing working in Beal's favor is his astonishing voice. One moment it's a soft and modest whisper, the kind of instrument that makes you want to lean in a little bit to make everything out. On songs like "Sambo Joe From the Rainbow", "Monotony", and "Evening's Kiss", all of which are sung quietly with just a steady strum of a guitar string or two, Beal is firmly in the mode of the late-night home-recording folkie. All seem like songs he might have recorded at 3 a.m. after being asleep for an hour two, trying to get them down before a short burst of dream inspiration faded. They are haunting and beautiful, and his barely-tuned guitar strumming, as well as the hermetic and occasionally surreal lyrics, brings to mind Jandek, an artist he admires.
But this is only one of his modes. "Take Me Away" finds Beal singing in a full-throated howl on a song that touches on blues by-way-of-field-holler. Accompanying his moans and growl is some kind of cheap, distorted hand-made percussion. Here Beal's love of Tom Waits is readily apparent-- if Waits stuck a version of "Take Me Away" on the back half of Mule Variations no one would have batted an eye. And then on "Ghost Robot", Beal does a (awkward, ultimately) version of rap that actually feels closer to Lost Poets-style proto-rap than anything hip-hop proper has produced in the last 30 years.
"Ghost Robot" aside, Beal brings something to the table no matter what kind of music he's making, and the highlights of Sorcery are impressive. But there's also a nagging sense that the songwriting and vision hasn't quite caught up with the talent. His lyrics have too many clunkers, his songs don't seem quite developed. In a different world, this would be Beal's third or fourth release, the one that comes after a couple of strong albums, serving to show his fans that he was doing something interesting early and on his own. This is not to say that the four-track lo-fi approach can't lead to great and important music-- see the recent issue of Weed Forestin', the first solo release by Lou Barlow's Sentridoh. Sometimes crude technology suits the music perfectly. But Beal's music seems to want something more. Songwriting aside, in his case, the limitations feel like just that-- something that prevents the work from being fully realized.
In that respect and a few others (the impressive vocal range, songs filled with introspection an ear for junkyard percussion) Beal has something in common with tUnE-yArDs circa BiRd-BrAiNs, even if his songs don't stand up to where Merrill Garbus' were then. So while Acousmatic Sorcery is interesting and occasionally even great on its own, it ultimately feels very much like a hyper-creative and gifted artist trying to figure out what he's doing. He's woodshedding, and it's often rewarding to listen in. But even during the best moments, you can't help thinking ahead to what might come next.


Released on Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon mastermind Mark Kozelek's Caldo Verde label, the debut LP from Owen Ashworth's post-Casiotone for the Painfully Alone project is the most wistful work he's committed to tape.

A Shut-In's Prayer

Owen Ashworth is familiar with nostalgia. His work as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, an often lo-fi, not-always-Casiotone-based indie pop project that officially came to an end in 2010, encompassed a range of emotions that often tasted more "bitter" than "sweet." Regret, longing, desire, scorn, and jealousy frequently featured on the menu, but what made those feelings resonate was the presence of memory in his songwriting, the idea that even the most painful experiences are worth remembering. That's why his earliest material was so diaristic, as well as why he once chose to write a song reminiscing on when bridge tolls amounted to no more than "one single crisp clean dollar bill." 2009's final Casiotone album, the anti-procreation treatise Vs. Children, is perhaps his most cynical work to date, but the concluding song "White Jetta" punctuated ruminations on sick mothers and unstable bloodlines with a mantra about staying young forever: "To stay the same/ To never change."
Three years removed, and Owen Ashworth's shell has cracked. A Shut-In's Prayer is the proper debut from his new project, Advance Base, and it's easily the most wistful work he's committed to tape. Couched in the most immediate and affecting melodies of his career, many of the stories told on A Shut-In's Prayer look back at the past mainly to remember its contents. Ashworth's flair for narrative detail is in top form, achieving a level so microscopic that, at one point, he zooms in while ruminating on familial ennui to describe a scene in a horror movie that several characters are watching together. Sometimes, as on the album highlight "Riot Grrrls", these trips down memory lane end with resolution-- or, at least, as much resolution that you could get from two college-age outcasts "Wondering if we ran/ Who'd miss us." Elsewhere, memories take on the form of child runaways and faded filial relationships, as Ashworth is left with disconnected threads between the past and present and not much more.
As a songwriter and, by proxy, as a human being, Ashworth's certainly grown since he started plinking out tape-hiss anti-anthems back in 1998. You can hear his musical progression in the pretty, at-times lush instrumentation on display here, a logical progression from the baroque figures of Vs. Children with added intimacy. He's made leaps and bounds as a singer, too: For all its warm mid-fi glow and quaint arrangements, A Shut-In's Prayer retains its affecting strength thanks to Ashworth's vocal performances. It still feels like a stretch to call him a "singer" by most mainstream standards, but the occasional sullen sneer of his earlier work has been smoothed out.
He's found a nice pocket of resonance in his low-pitched voice, and his higher register is pleasant and sing-songy. Ashworth uses the latter disarmingly on "More Trouble", the album's most easygoing and upbeat tune that, upon closer inspection, is about the grim inevitability of waiting for bad news from a doctor. There are a few songs on A Shut-In's Prayer that deal with such weighty subject matter-- "New Gospel"'s advice to a substance-addled depressive, the troubled sibling relationship detailed in "My Sister's Birthday"-- but the album otherwise largely carries the type of fuzzy sadness that you'd get from looking at old pictures of past (and, possibly, better) times. That such an openly nostalgic album is seeing release on Caldo Verde is a humorous coincidence, given that its founder, Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon mastermind Mark Kozelek, recently waxed nostalgic on "Sunshine in Chicago", a gorgeous cut from SKM's forthcoming album Among the Leaves. If 2012 is the year that downer-music veteran loner types finally start to express some sort of happiness, out of their fondness of the past or otherwise, then so be it.
A Shut-In's Prayer is arguably the strongest album of Owen Ashworth's career thus far, and it arrives at a time when the influence of his former project looms over specific spheres of indie music. The trapped-in-suburbia haze of Youth Lagoon's Trevor Powers carries Casiotone's torch of homespun intimacy; Mike Hadreas takes the project's raconteurish flair to new, bruising depths as Perfume Genius; and South Carolina songwriter Mat Cothran's Coma Cinema project possesses the cynicism of Ashworth's youth. As those young artists continue to grow, so does Owen Ashworth, and this new chapter of his 15-year run carries such promise that fixating on the past almost seems pointless, since the future potentially holds so much more in store.


The idiosyncratic electro-pop singer-songwriter (and Eurovision contestant) turns his pen to the mundane magic of household chores, but it too often looks like he missed a spot.

Domesticated

A vast amount of music is consumed at home, often lightening the domestic chores that map out our days. It’s a surprise, then, that so few musicians draw direct inspiration from the day-to-day grind of domesticity. Gnomic French musician Sébastien Tellier says that his sixth album, Domesticated, was inspired by dirty dishes in the sink, soiled laundry on the floor, and the two children responsible for so much of that mess; reflecting that mundane magic, its eight songs drift by on a light glaze of electro disco.
This kind of mischievous concept suits Tellier, a singer who mixes the exotic with the humdrum and the sublime with the ridiculous. You can imagine him pushing the vacuum cleaner around his chic Paris apartment to the disco boogie of “Venezia,” while the Valium melancholy on a song like “Stuck in a Summer Love” raises the mournful spirit of Chris de Burgh’s ’80s standard “The Lady in Red.” Both songs seem tailor-made for washing up tearfully to daytime radio.
On the whole, though, Tellier doesn’t seem to land the theme. “A Ballet,” for example, plays on the French word for “broom" (“balai”), a borderline pun that few listeners outside of France will understand, while the very repetitive lyrics to “Domestic Tasks” barely expand on the promise of the title. It’s not that this record is ill suited to domesticity, exactly, but if someone claimed that Domesticated was actually about round-the-world yachting or Olympic diving you could easily believe them.
Luckily, Tellier has a production concept too. His aim on Domesticated was to assemble a new wave of producers—including Jam City and France’s Corentin Kerdraon, aka NIT—to create a futuristic pop sound, leaving him free to concentrate on his supposed melodic strengths. The result is a devilishly lush instrumental vibe, whose wipe-clean aesthetic brings to mind ’80s pop refracted through the robotic luster of Jam City’s Classical Curves. “A Ballet” comes replete with soaring sax break and aching Art of Noise chords, while the electro-synth shuffle of “Hazy Feelings” seems to crave the sweetly anachronistic release of a slap bass, without ever giving in to temptation.
These production choices—while not as futuristic as Tellier might like to believe—do at least fit with Domesticated’s homely theme, gleaming like the well-polished kitchen surfaces of a Patrick Bateman fantasy. But Tellier’s unassuming voice, so touching in its modesty on his 2003 classic “La Ritournelle,” suffers from the slaver of vocoder-esque effects. It sounds at times like Tellier is singing with a mouthful of porridge from the back of a wardrobe, the lyrics indiscernible to all but his closest associates, which leaves the melodies with a heavy emotional weight to convey.
This shouldn’t be a problem: you don’t represent France in the Eurovision Song Contest (as Tellier did in 2008) without being able to pen a golden refrain. But the album’s odd moments of melodic sparkle—the winsome desire lines of “Won” or the doleful swoon of “Oui”—are never quite enough, symptomatic of a record that comes tantalizingly close to satisfying without quite scaling the heights. Domesticated is a concept album whose concept falls flat; a shot at the future that’s too in debt to the past; a brilliant idea consumed by inertia—less back-breaking deep clean than half-hearted tidy.


The Canadian composer turns from electroacoustic minimalism to contemplative, deeply focused compositions for piano, organ, voice, and strings.

Pale Bloom

Each of Sarah Davachi’s releases develops a distinct sense of place. Though her last few records have comprised subtle electroacoustic renderings of instrumental textures, Davachi has also intermittently played with compositional restraints, and Pale Bloom picks up that idea, beginning from the austere confines of the piano solo. The organ tones that undergirded much of her recent work suggested a secular version of the church nave. Here, the walls close in and we’re transported somewhere deceptively plain, to what might be an afternoon recital in someone’s home.
Piano was Davachi’s first instrument, and on “Perfumes I–III,” the three-part suite that makes up Pale Bloom’s A-side, it plays an elemental, if ultimately complex, role. Before eventually returning to the sustained tones that characterize so much of her work, the album first wanders through the field of classical composition. The melody on “Perfumes I” is minor, elegant, affecting but grayscale. More dramatic than the piano notes themselves is the cold silence that punctuates them, lasting for seconds at a time. Midway through, a drone (the piano processed backwards?) begins to pulse its way to the forefront. It intensifies the sound—the piano takes on a slight dynamic insistence as it begins a heartrending ascent into a higher register—and also makes strange our sense of environment. It is as if a window in the room had let in an unsettling breeze from an advancing storm.
“Perfumes II” begins with another subdued piano performance, winding its way to a yearning cluster of notes. This piece also hinges on the introduction of a new element at its midway point: a vocal performance by Fausto Dayap Daos, whose layered tenor phrases are swirled into a haunting chorus. Some iterations of his voice remain distant, but the piano stays close, our solid ground. On the suite’s concluding entry, space is at last filled all the way in with a series of sustained tones from an organ, which the piano accents in deliberately applied chords. In place of the movement of the two preceding pieces, here she explores a developing relationship between the two sets of tones; it invites sinking in, an unexpected encounter with the sublime.
I’ve been turning to Davachi’s work when craving a kind of blossoming pathos; recent compositions like “Third Hour” and “Buhrstone” ache their way to vivid peaks. In a productive rebuke of that habit of listening, there’s a focused severity here—again, the recital quality, a sense of solemnity—that forecloses any dramatic displays of emotion. That doesn’t mean that the stark lines of Pale Bloom don’t resonate with feeling, but it is, perhaps, a feeling distilled, feeling so concentrated we have to work a little harder to make sense of it as listeners.
The album’s B-side, “If It Pleased Me to Appear to You Wrapped in This Drapery,” matches “Perfumes I–III” in the way it builds up from musical elements at their most reduced. Single-note threads of viola and violin perform a call-and-response dance and eventually intersect in crystalline layers. When they’re joined by the warmth of pipe organ in a lower register, the unadorned fullness of the sound is nearly overwhelming. The physical tension that makes these affecting notes possible resonates in the body, and when the entire thing turns discordant in the piece’s final minutes, we’re folded into its thread-by-thread dissolution. Even at their most rigorous, these compositions manage to hold the listener close—a bare but rewarding intimacy.


The producer and luxury furniture seller gathers the biggest names in rap once again for a market-researched album that’s as repetitive as his catchphrases.

Khaled Khaled

This past winter, DJ Khaled started an OnlyFans account with Fat Joe, continuing his recent campaign of total media saturation. Between his Snapchats, his advice book, the luxury furniture line (We the Best Home), the podcast, and his reinvention as a self-help guru, Khaled has spent the last decade in pursuit of constant virality, too in on the joke for it to be funny anymore. Following his motivational triumph routine in 2021 feels like discovering you still have the T-Pain app or Lil B’s Basedmojis on your phone—you remember why everyone found them amusing, but you’re a little embarrassed that you once did, too.
Buying into DJ Khaled’s shtick has never been a prerequisite for enjoying his music, though. He’s always taken a backseat to the collaborations he curates; and lately, he’s been less of a presence on his albums than ever—he doesn’t even shout or ad-lib much anymore, and that was his one thing. There’s a growing disconnect between Khaled the gregarious living meme and Khaled the auto-pilot behind star-studded rap albums with all the individuality of a Now That’s What I Call Music compilation. Khaled Khaled is his 12th record, and we’re so used to them by now that you can forget what a radical exercise they are: rap albums where the A&R rep is the star, unapologetic unit shifters that don’t even disguise their disinterest in artistry, cohesion, or substance.
Khaled’s albums weren’t always this cynical. His earliest records lovingly hyped his native Florida rap scene and other kindred pockets of the south. But over the years, he lost any sense of scene stewardship, and his purview expanded to include anything that sells—out went Trick Daddy and in came Justin Bieber, who joins 21 Savage on one of Khaled Khaled’s lowlights, “Let It Go,” recycling the summery, Bud Light Lime-A-Rita vibes of 2017’s “I’m The One.” Consider it one of Khaled’s unwritten keys: If it worked before, then repeat. It’s not for nothing that he’s made “Another one...” one of his guiding mantras.
Khaled’s aversion to risk is unrivaled: He gathers the biggest names in rap, then has them make the same music they’d record on their own anyway. Sometimes staying out of the way works—the album’s first two singles were just Drake solo tracks with Khaled’s name on them. But the returns are never more than the sum of the talent involved. Put Lil Durk and Lil Baby (in the first of his three features on the record) over a brass-knuckled Tay Keith beat on “Every Chance I Get,” and you get an undeniable banger. Weigh down H.E.R. with messy Migos and Meek Mill verses, and you’re cutting your losses.
Even Khaled Khaled’s boldest pairings don’t land, which speaks to how difficult it is to get excited about anything on a DJ Khaled tracklist at this point. A collab from former enemies Nas and Jay-Z was once a major event, but there’s no indication of their long history on the drowsy “Sorry Not Sorry.” Nobody’s trying to one-up anybody here; instead, the two weary icons rap about their recent investments like distant colleagues making labored small talk at a happy hour destined to end after one drink. Elsewhere, the record takes Khaled’s recent habit of obvious samples to obnoxious new extremes. The shrill guitars of Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” slash and claw a the Post Malone, Megan Thee Stallion, and DaBaby feature “I Did It” like the worst idea The Hood Internet ever had.
It’s the closer “Where You Come From,” with dancehall titans Buju Banton, Capleton, and Bounty Killer, that most stands out, and not only because it’s the album’s lone reggae track. It’s the one song that feels like it exists not out of Khaled’s unquenchable thirst for streams, but because he genuinely likes it—the album’s hardest track by a distance, it drips with fanboy enthusiasm. Khaled Khaled begs for a few more outliers like this, moments where Khaled tosses his market research out of the window and trusts his passions. As a public figure, DJ Khaled gives us so much of himself. On his records, he gives us so little.

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The self-produced debut from the Chicago-based band recalls the downcast, hazy vibe of Alex G and Soccer Mommy.

Moveys

Moveys, the self-produced debut LP from the Wisconsin-bred, Chicago-based band Slow Pulp, is a soundtrack for aimless afternoon walks and light existential crises, as the temperature drops and our hours spent outdoors shorten. It arrives into an uncertain autumn, half a year through a pandemic with no end in sight, on the precipice of an unknowable winter. Both cathartic and restrained, the album feels like a prelude to seasonal depression, fueled by internal battles and external tensions.
There’s strength to be derived from Emily Massey’s cool moan as it pierces the warm acoustics, a magnetic resilience that comes through with each word: “If I could treat myself better/I know I’m still getting better.” She sings about the exhausting task of being alive—the load is particularly heavy on the topic of relationships, tracing the longing, the pursuit, the letdown, and the recovery. She’s “holding out for the downside” on “Idaho” and seeing through that self-fulfilled prophecy on the punk-tinged “At It Again.”
Slow Pulp worked on Moveys while on tour with Alex G last year, and his influence is evident. The album is marked by down-tuned guitars and lyrics that don’t paint a picture as much as they set a mood. “Track” is led by a spiraling riff that recalls some of Alex G’s more recent, polished material mixed with cadences reminiscent of Soccer Mommy. “Falling Apart” internalizes the familiar feeling of failure: “Why don’t you go back/To falling apart/You were so good at that...Feeling like a deadbeat / Everything is incomplete.” Violins spin defeat into something vaguely comforting.
For the most part, Moveys is a well-structured album. The tracklist reflects the monotony and fatigue of depression, with alternating textures that keep things engaging, a grungy crooner alongside a triumphant piano interlude. But the final bonus track calls these choices into question. The titular "Movey" is a goofy dance tune—complete with vinyl scratching, bass grooving, and someone yelling “Scram!”—an abrupt follow-up to a song that laments, “I’m a loner with no plans.” While the closer may not immediately resonate with a listener coming down from 25 minutes of introspection, it succeeds in ejecting you from the album, almost as if Slow Pulp is rolling the credits and yelling, “show’s over, folks.” It puts the preceding melancholia into perspective, no longer dire. There’s hope on the other side.

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Carta is the third album and major label debut from Especia, a five-piece frequently billed as "Japanese vaporwave idols." Although it doesn’t reach the heights of earlier works, it’s a solid snapshot of what Especia has done so well in recent times: real-deal city pop blessed with big hooks and copious saxophone solos.

Carta

Faced with rapidly declining sales, Japanese music labels went niche over the last five years. They catered to very specific demographics rather than listeners at large via "idol pop" groups devoted to subcultures. The best case scenario was a group like Babymetal going viral and reaching a more general audience, but catering to steampunk aficionados or fans of um, "chubbiness" proved just as efficient. Yet no pop group’s identity has been stranger than Especia’s, a five-piece frequently billed as "Japanese vaporwave idols." They’ve embraced the stylings of an Internet subgenre infatuated with pitched-down vocals and old technology, while their primary producer has openly mentioned how influential acts such as Espirit空想 and Saint Pepsi (now Skylar Spence) have been to their sound. The commitment goes deep—they’ve recorded entire live shows onto VHS tape.
Yet Especia is more complicated than simple microgenre imitation. Look beneath the Grecian busts and Windows 95 logos, and you’ll find many vaporwave artists using slowed-down Japanese songs from the 1980s as source material, particularly from a glitzy genre called city pop, indebted to American AOR and funk, that reflected Japan's then-decadent lifestyle. Especia’s actual music leans closer to real-deal city pop, blessed with big hooks and copious saxophone solos, than anything by James Ferraro or Oneohtrix Point Never.
Carta, the group’s third album and first for a major label, continues their brand of vaporwave-inspired dabbling—look closely at the straight-out-of-Myst cover art and you’ll see what looks suspiciously like the Enron logo—but offers a mostly straight-ahead set of mellow pop. It’s the outfit’s final release as a quintet, as three members are set to "graduate" shortly after its release, and even though it doesn’t reach the heights of earlier works, it’s a solid snapshot of what Especia has done so well in recent times to stand out on a purely sonic level.
The bulk of Carta leans toward easygoing music punched up by brass sections and bubbly synthesizer, the sort of songs that sound best as the evening is just settling in. The trio Hi-Fi City (featuring Especia’s main producer Schtein&Longer, PellyColo, and saxophonist Yoshiro Nakagawa) handle most of the songwriting and production, bringing a deep knowledge of style that helps Especia’s music rise above simple recycling. "Over Time" and "Sunshower" sway at the pace of Brand New Heavies, while the squiggly bass and saxophone blurts of "Mistake" nail the urban drama of city pop wonderfully. These are solid recreations of retro sounds not hiding their influences—"Rittenhouse Square"'s title reveals the Philadelphia soul approximation before the first horn stab—that at their worst still sound smooth and pleasant.
But Carta works in a smattering of other sounds to keep things moving. Hip-hop plays a prominent role, the members of Especia breaking into rap at various points that channels the same time period the rest of the album does. Less charming—and, positioned as the album opener, a horrible introduction—is "Clover," an arena-sized rock ballad assembled by a trio of older Japanese rockers. It would be cheesy in any decade, but made worse by how unnatural it forces Especia to sing, their voices better suited for mellow than soaring. Also mixed in is one direct embrace of vaporwave sound on "Saudade," produced by Brazilian artist VHS Logos and featuring narcotized recordings of the group’s members playing a game. It’s a nice breather.
Most of Carta registers as simply "solid, if a bit thin." Yet the album—and the current version of Especia—ends on a high, courtesy of the collection’s two big pop moments, the tropical-scented shuffler "Boogie Aroma" and the high-stepping "Aviator," the latter in particularly delivering the album’s most charged-up hook. These instances highlight what have made Especia stand out in Japan even more than the vaporwave wallpaper—catchy earworms every bit as good as the silly videos.


Yachty is our master of joy. His debut album is well-polished and full of pop-rap confections, but his polarizing style hardly captures the nuance suggested by the album’s cover and title.

Teenage Emotions

The most polarizing figure in hip-hop today never asked to become a provocateur or rap reformist, but he was happy to oblige. When confectioner Lil Yachty and his team of teenaged separatists broke rank, more influenced by Kid Cudi and Chief Keef and pop-rockers Coldplay than the cliche rap Mt. Rushmore types, they challenged long-established ideas about what rap should sound like.
Yachty’s refusal to engage with rap’s legacy renewed a culture clash that’s been waged between warring factions for decades now. But his enthusiastic, sometimes silly delivery and his all-around cheerfulness have endeared him to a new generation of rap fans. Feel-good tunes quickly made him both a leader of the current rap youth movement and the one most likely to cross over to pop audiences. Platforms of positivity and inclusivity seem a fitting countermeasure in a climate where the most popular rap group in the country will denounce a colleague for being gay. A selling point has always been the whimsy, Yachty’s flippant disregard for convention, focusing on playful melodies that sound like jingles for Nicktoons. He is most comfortable when gleeful and thrives on fun, but can struggle to sustain ideas. Lil Yachty’s debut album Teenage Emotions, released after a breakout mixtape and an Apple Exclusive, is his most complete work yet, but it doesn’t contain the nuance its cover and title suggest.
Teenage Emotions feels hollow next to the real, complicated emotions of teens; his stories here are usually rendered without depth or dimension, more like sketches of impulses. But in his element, Yachty’s rare feel for earworms and his unorthodox cadences let him cut corners, unleashing a series of non-sequiturs with such levity that it’s like frolicking in a bouncy castle. He is our master of joy. Songs like “All Around Me” and “FYI (Know Now)” fill bubblegum productions with his animated flows. “Harley” leaps and bounds through repetitions. The intro, “Like a Star,” beams with exuberance before drifting into a more delicate tune, one that is genuinely pleasant, and it’s the first of many signs that Yachty is figuring things out.
Yachty has polished the edges of his Auto-Tuned warbles since the Lil Boat mixtape, which were often grating in their attempts to find a pitch. And he’s growing more proficient in songcraft, constructing tunes that don’t suddenly sputter and stall out. Early records sounded like they were carelessly-assembled and that cheekiness was almost half of the appeal. But Teenage Emotions is refined and moves with more purpose. Over a woozy WondaGurl production, Yachty pushes in and out of falsetto on “Lady in Yellow,” turning a repeating stanza into a refrain but occasionally changing the lyrics. Opposite singer Grace, who he originally teamed up with for DJ Cassidy’s “Honor,” he seems poised for a crossover on “Running With a Ghost” and his Diplo collaboration, “Forever Young,” is a satisfying pop rap delight. These moments showcase Yachty’s charms. Where he gets into trouble is when he seeks the approval of rap pundits.
At some point, the finger-wagging purists got into Yachty’s head because being the scapegoat for ruining an entire genre can have that effect on a person. But he dramatically overcorrected, spending far too much energy trying to pass himself off as an acceptable rapper’s rapper, or as someone agreeable to classicist sensibilities. Several songs on Teenage Emotions try to fit into a model Yachty was never built for, and he ends up with lines like, “She blow that dick like a cello.” Listening to him tense up during tough talk on “DN Freestyle” and “X Men” is painful. These moments are off message and off brand. What results is an album that’s half fun, half struggle—loosening one minute then tightening up the next, but always dilly dallying.
Despite some indecision on to whom he's speaking, Yachty does challenge himself to take on new roles on Teenage Emotions, and in certain instances he’s bewitching. On “Made of Glass,” a soothing synthpop ballad, he sings of unrequited love, unseen by the girl of his dreams. As he moves in unison with the sample on “No More,” which is distorted and disorienting, he laments being pursued by gold diggers. It’s one of the few times he engages thoughtfully with his celebrity. On “Priorities,” he assesses the decisions he’s made, finding a nice singsong balance. Though far too long and sometimes aimless, Teenage Emotions is the mind of a child star blown-up and on exhibition at the epicenter of modern rap. It’s there to be gawked at and appreciated, and then maybe enjoyed.


Without the self-assurance of her debut, the New York songwriter’s second full-length is an album in search of an identity.

Devotion

Margaret Glaspy’s 2016 debut Emotions & Math was effective and confident blues-rock, grounded in the strains of folk, and elevated by a bombastic Shawn Everett mix. Two years later, her Born Yesterday EP adopted a stripped-back live sound, allowing her songs to come together regardless of arrangement. After a brief hiatus, she reconvened with producer Tyler Chester and traded guitars for Ableton, becoming the latest folk musician to embrace electronics. But reinventions do not guarantee a satisfying record. Without the self-assurance of her debut, Glaspy’s follow-up, Devotion, is an album in search of an identity. Part lighthearted synth-pop, part mild-mannered MOR pop, it’s too slight to endanger a promising career but too bland to be an interesting misfire.
With Devotion, Glaspy trades swagger for sincerity, risking corniness for the sake of honest expression. It should feel liberating—and writing it likely did—but on record it’s either unimaginative or baffling. With the exception of “You Amaze Me,” buried towards the end of the record, Glaspy strays away from the favorable Elliott Smith comparisons of her debut. As Devotion attempts to push in new directions, misguided stylistic choices turn into distractions. When Glaspy opens “Killing What Keeps Us Alive” with a garbled vocoder, it only recalls the sound Imogen Heap perfected 15 years ago.
Nothing else is equally jarring, but the stylistic missteps continue throughout. “What’s the Point” leads with a dubstep synth before delving into an aimless imitation of John Congleton’s crunchy, flanged productions. Ballads like “Young Love” and “Without Him” are closer to Sara Bareilles territory, without the benefit of Bareilles’ extroversion and big choruses. Title track “Devotion” veers so far into adult-contemporary R&B that it begins to resemble Maroon 5’s “Sunday Morning.” When Glaspy and Chester do land on a memorable, sinuous groove with “You’ve Got My Number,” the song stumbles over ungainly lyrics like, “And if I had to choose just a few words to summarize you/‘Gorgeous’ and ‘true’ wouldn’t surprise you.”
The simplistic couplets and labored aphorisms are the record’s biggest disappointment. Glaspy’s penchant for stringing together idioms turns whole verses into mush: “They say two halves make a whole/But I am half empty and you are half full,” she proclaims on “Without Him.” On the lone rocker “So Wrong It’s Right,” a series of dog puns abruptly turns maudlin: “Tonight I’m off the leash, running wild and free/And you just so happen to be right next to me.” Glaspy’s wordplay sometimes leaned on “fish in the sea”-style clichés in the past, but here the folksy turns of phrase become overwhelming. The preciousness muddles her ideas, like the non-dichotomy posed by “Stay With Me”: “When it all shakes down/Who’s the clown and who’s the savior?”
Devotion is not a disaster, but the chasm between ambition and execution feels vast. The new ideas are ill-fitting, when they’re not derivative from the start. Beneath the processing, the album’s best moments sound oddly like a less polished version of Emotions & Math. Even “You Amaze Me,” a lovely intimate acoustic number, feels like a lesser “Somebody to Anybody,” a lovely intimate acoustic number from the last album. Otherwise, little on this record works with Glaspy’s strengths as a songwriter—or, due to the change in instrumentation, as a musician. There are still glimpses of her usual frank, heartfelt songwriting on Devotion, but they’re not worth seeking out in a package this dull.

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