With the song of the summer belt around her waist, the Memphis rapper collects on the “F.N.F.” fame with a rowdy, promising debut EP.

Anyways, Life’s Great… EP

Nike might’ve fired GloRilla for posting videos turning up to Beyoncé with her best friend, but where the sports brand saw a nuisance, millions of others saw a star. The brazen optimism it takes to turn a retail shift into a virtual concert is just part of what makes the 22-year-old rapper so enticing. Raised in Memphis, Glo was a choir girl who got into mischief with rowdy kids in her neighborhood. Off the heels of the crunk anthem “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” and Cardi B-assisted throat punch “Tomorrow 2,” the patron saint of newly single women and rabble-rousers turns lemons into mace and gold chains on her debut EP.
Anyways, Life’s Great… is a crash course on faith, which must feel like a birthright for someone named Gloria Hallelujah. “Every day the sun won’t shine/But that’s why I love tomorrows,” she affirms like a preacher. Mary J. Blige, the prophet of divorce anthems, couldn’t help but rap the lyrics to Glo’s debut single. Written during a 60-day man cleanse, “F.N.F.” was conceived from heartbreak and delivered by a blunt. You get the sense that even if her credit score dipped to the 300s, and she had just walked in on the love of her life cheating, and totaled her car all in the span of 24 hours, she would still find a silver lining: “Pussy good, check!”
While people fervently pit female rappers against each other, GloRilla has emerged as a diplomat. Camaraderie is front and center in her music videos, live performances, and collaborations. It’s not a Glo production without a cameo from her best friend and day-one collaborator Gloss Up. Her friends even accompanied her when she got signed to her label, chanting her song on Yo Gotti’s private jet like they were also getting signed. She talks about falling out with her girlfriends with unparalleled grief: “So many hoes done switched on me I’m starting to hate the friend word/Calling me dat shit is like da white folks saying da N-word.” Fellow Memphian Niki Pooh’s verse on “Get That Money” is a ladies-know-your-worth shoulder grab: “If you can ask for ass then I can ask you for ya cheese/Now come on sista sis let’s keep it real.” North and the South collide on “Tomorrow 2” as Cardi lacerates and Glo rubs salt in the open wound: “Fake bitch, that’s why my friend fucked on your nigga/Both you bitches pussy, I think y’all should scissor,” the Bronx native hisses. At times Cardi dominates the track, but Glo remains an energizing host.
As someone who managed to make a children’s book sound like a ransom note, she’s a gangsta rapper at her core. She walks the path paved by Three 6 Mafia’s Gangsta Boo and La Chat—two women who infused ’90s Southern rap with androgynous raunch. Glo’s stomping delivery over floor-rumbling drums, pianos fit for the Undertaker, and crisp snares could provoke the meekest of souls to smash car windows. But beneath her infectious toothy grin, there’s pain. “When they treat you like the strongest it make you the weakest,” she muses over sentimental keys. “If I ever asked for help that mean I really need it.” Her abortion, life in poverty, and the domestic abuse she’s witnessed all factor into her music and make the cathartic element of “F.N.F.” that much more potent. Glo’s off-the-cuff rant about betrayal over “No More Love”’s bed of plaintive R&B heightens the despondency, although her voice almost reaches a bark. Closing the album with a call from an incarcerated loved one, she’s jovial as he showers her in praise. Then the automated “one minute remaining” disrupts their intimate conversation, but they continue to laugh despite the looming reminder of the forces working against them.
In just two singles, a handful of collabs (including link-ups with Gloss Up, Aleza, Slimeroni, and K Carbon), and now an EP, Glo broadened rap’s palette with her distinct husky voice, gritty bars, and party-starting magnetism. A handful of these songs exhibit similar instrumentals and flow templates, but the rock-inflected “No More Love” and poppy “Get That Money” hint at a budding versatility. Lyrically, she’s agile and disarming: “Poppin’ shit, you would think I went to school for chiropractin’.” Decorum is miserable. GloRilla is merciless.


Reworking his past material as jazz instrumentals, Bryan Ferry's The Jazz Age is a self-consciously 1920s collection, openly meant to evoke Louis Armstrong, early Count Basie, and the initial mass popularization of the form.

The Jazz Age

Bryan Ferry works steadily, recording, releasing, and (only if necessary, perhaps) touring new albums, even if he remains unable to step out from what was established on earlier work. But then Ferry seemed born to both reinterpret and to look backwards. His solo career started one year after Roxy Music's own debut full length with These Foolish Things, a collection of soul, jazz, and rock'n'roll standards often revisited in utterly surprising ways. By the time of his third solo album Let's Stick Together, Ferry combined yet more covers with reworkings of Roxy's own material just a few years after it had been written and recorded-- his preference for focused contemplation and his particularly male vision of love, lust, and wariness came to the fore.
All told, he's done six albums of covers and revisions over 40 years' time. The Jazz Age is the seventh out of 14 solo efforts total, though Ferry acts as co-producer and general driving force rather than performer. In fact, for the first time since Let's Stick Together, Ferry's own material is the subject of reworking: all selections are his work ranging from Roxy's debut single "Virginia Plain" to "Reason or Rhyme", a song from Ferry's previous solo album Olympia. To a degree, The Jazz Age's roots lie in 1999's As Time Goes By, where Ferry recorded jazz and pop songs predominantly from the 1930s. Five out of The Jazz Age's eight performers reappear from the earlier work along with others such as regular Ferry collaborator, trumpeter Enrico Tomasso. But The Jazz Age, a collection of instrumentals performed by the Bryan Ferry Orchestra, is more self-consciously 1920s, openly meant to evoke Louis Armstrong, early Count Basie, and the initial mass popularization of jazz.
If there's an inescapable element of perverseness about The Jazz Age, it's the sense of flattening a life's work into pastiche, down to the fact that the album is mixed and produced in non-hi-fi mono, something definitely not the case on As Time Goes By. It doesn't matter whether the source material is a frenetic explosion like "Do the Strand", a clipped mood piece like "Love is the Drug" or "Don't Stop the Dance", or contemplative songs like "Avalon". The resultant energetic but never too disruptive presentation turns everything into something which sounds like it could be coming out of the Victrola at a party at "Downton Abbey" by the time the show hits season five. The album is hard to immediately see as anything but a studied curio by a famous name deliberately out of sync with nearly everything around it, unless one wants to talk about Hugh Laurie's tribute to New Orleans and the blues.
The internal trick of The Jazz Age is that Ferry's orchestra also deftly avoids simply sounding one-note despite the uniform presentation and ambience. At points the arrangements are almost specific responses to the originals. "The Bogus Man" here shrinks from 10 to two minutes long, hinting at second line comedy before the funeral's actually been completed, while "I Thought", a slow, stately number from 2002's Frantic, and his utterly poised 1985 hit "Slave to Love" both become peppy dance numbers. But whatever prompted the various reinterpretations, surprises turn up one by one, almost always enjoyably so. "Avalon” kicks off with a rhythmic strut that's far more New Orleans than Newcastle, the crystalline theatricality of "Reason or Rhyme" mutates into a one-room-over and slightly boozy speakeasy swing, and "Virginia Plain"'s dramatic pauses showcase notably friendlier sounding solos.
Meanwhile, a telling break from Ferry's other work lies in the total absence of his most famous calling card-- his voice, with it his lyrical concerns and image. If anyone is the lead "voice" throughout it would be Tomasso or saxophonists Alan Barnes and Richard White, whose various solo turns on a number of songs take the place of the singing. As a result, it becomes a strangely affecting blend-- Ferry is here almost by implication, a certain unavoidably melancholic sigh that emerges in hints in the arrangements, even at their merriest.
The end result is actually the most atypical Ferry album of them all. It's something that seemed-- only after it was announced-- obvious that he would do but never actually did. It's also something he may never do again. It may not be an extreme reworking of song forms or a sudden return to action, perhaps simply another chapter in the various indulgences he enjoys, but in numerous ways, The Jazz Age is Ferry's most radical work yet.


After touring with Harry Styles, the Nashville songwriter returns with another showcase for her clear, expressive voice and exquisite sense of melody.

Weird Faith

Falling in love can be beautiful, but isn’t it kind of absurd and mortifying, too? This paradox is at the heart of Weird Faith, the new album from Nashville singer and songwriter Madi Diaz. She approaches it with an impeccable sense of melody and a series of potent questions, the kind that run like a third rail underneath a new relationship’s honeymoon phase (and, often, its decline): “Do you think this could ruin your life?” “How well do you wanna get to know me?” “Is it hard to love me?”
Diaz got her biggest break as a solo artist a couple years ago, after releasing 2021’s stellar History of a Feeling. But her resume runs much deeper: A Berklee dropout, she moved to Nashville, then L.A., then back to Nashville to work as a songwriter, contributing to tracks for artists like Kesha and Little Big Town and writing music for soundtracks and commercials. All the while, she was writing and recording solo albums that struggled to find their footing. History of a Feeling kickstarted a dramatic shift in her trajectory. That record documented the end of a long-term relationship, which coincided with the start of her ex-partner’s gender transition—a complex, nuanced denouement that she captured in perceptive, charged, and occasionally excruciating folk-tinged indie-rock songs. From there, things took off: her first solo tour in almost a decade, TV bookings, and tours opening for indie icons (Waxahatchee, Angel Olsen) and even a pop megastar (Harry Styles, whose touring band she briefly joined).
Though Diaz has played for stadium-sized crowds, Weird Faith is not a record of bright lights and pyrotechnics, but a document of particular, personal idiosyncrasies—like a domestic fantasy that ends with death on the swooning “Kiss the Wall,” or the way she turns every teenager’s favorite lewd party game into an ode to complicated coexistence on “KFM.” Her lyrics dig into details, zeroing into some particularly strange moments in relationships: the weirdness of continually running into your partner’s ex (“Girlfriend”); the painful middle of a slowly fizzling romance (“For Months Now”). Diaz doesn’t veer much from the straightforward production that marked History of a Feeling, but she knows how to add layers of sound to inject a little catharsis, like the brief, fuzzy squall in “Kiss the Wall” or the kaleidoscopic overlay of voices towards the end of “God Person.”
Diaz’s voice is resonant and emotionally rich—sometimes pleading, sometimes dejected, sometimes a gentle whisper and occasionally a powerful belt—and her ear for melody is exquisite, filling her songs with crisp, memorable hooks. This combination helps make even her broadest gestures, like the waltzing breakup ballad “Don’t Do Me Good,” a duet with Kacey Musgraves, feel lived-in but not overworked. This is particularly true of the moving title track, cowritten with Americana stalwart Lori McKenna. It’s an ode to continuing to believe—not just through the awkward beginning of love but also through the trials and heartbreak that can follow—that vulnerability is worth the risk. This theme could land Diaz in Hallmark-card territory, but the song’s intimacy and restraint—just Diaz’s warm and weary voice and an acoustic guitar—make it instead feel like a gentle pep talk from an older sister. Hoping for love after getting burned a few times can be absurd and mortifying in its own way; here, Diaz makes a compelling case for it anyway.


Konx-om-Pax is the project of electronic musician Tom Scholefield. His second LP Caramel fondly invokes nostalgia for the rave era, playing like the faded tracers and seared after-images that remain.

Caramel

There’s no exact English translation for the Greek phrase Κόγξ ὀμ πὰξ, though it has been repurposed by English occultist Aleister Crowley and by Italian composer-mystic Giacinto Scelsi. “Light in extension” or “Light rushing out in a single ray” is the rough translation of Konx-om-Pax, which is also the handle for animator, graphic designer and electronic music maker Tom Scholefield. Scholefield’s visuals have informed many artists over the years, be they as cover art for Oneohtrix Point Never and Rustie, videos for Mogwai and Hudson Mohawke, or as part of Lone’s live show.
His debut album Regional Surrealism was for the most part slow and downcast, but his four-years-in-the-making follow-up Caramel embodies the project name by embracing that notion of “light” in all its manifold meanings. As he recently stated in an interview, “this record was almost a therapy…an attempt to be aggressively positive.” It’s also about the flashing lights of the bygone rave era, and much like Jamie xx, Special Request, Lone et al., Scholefield approached his music as an homage and idealization of an era that ended well before he could experience it. As he admits in the same interview: “[It’s] kind of an imaginary nostalgia because I was just a kid at the time.”
That fantasia of rave’s lights and strobes informs Caramel. Like these aforementioned acts, it's not so much about replicating those sounds—much less the ferocious drum programming—but rather the faded tracers and cornea-seared after images that remain. So while there are beats and thumps embedded in Konx-om-Pax’s tracks, they are secondary to the neon hues that wiggle atop them, bright as gummy worms. That sense of distance can make a tape-hiss heavy track like “Video Club” sound like dance music going chillwave, its infomercial-style melody and laser sounds a bit too on-the-nose. But on “Perc Rave,” Scholefield changes up that strategy, dropping a lashing rhythm that would scan as furious, if it didn’t sound like it was emitted by a drum machine left by the side of the road to sputter.
Throughout, Konx-om-Pax toggles between the bliss of dance music and the visceral surge of noise, suggesting he’s taken the lessons of both Lone and Mogwai to heart. Some tracks even embrace that dichotomy: the first half of “Oren’s Theme” is a woozy loop of “ooo baby” as all manner of Aphex chimes blip about it. But just as it’s about to turn whimsical, belches of great noise overtake it, allowing just enough of those chimes back in to strike a balance. “Mega Glacial” suggests the Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo mix as filtered through Boards of Canada’s murky melodicism.
Too often, the album’s melodies suggest end credits, so that you might mistake the album winding down even at the midway point. And sometimes when the drums rise in the mix, it’s not to move your body but more to remind you of the underlying theme, distracting from the other textures. But for all of the album’s moments of luminous noise and rave earmarks, Caramel is at its best in its quieter moments, with “At the Lake” and “Rainbow Bounce” layering arpeggiated melodies until they shimmer like oil on a puddle. It’s fitting that its most gorgeous track is entitled “Radiance.” Beatless but gridded by what sounds like gently stroked rebar, Scholefield layers these blurry sounds carefully, the effect not unlike sunrise after a rave has wound down, when dawn light imbues everything with its glow.


On Keep on Your Mean Side and No Wow, the Kills managed to take a classic rock template and turn it into something more modern and audibly dangerous; here, the band pushes those edges even further.

Midnight Boom

Stylish, sexy, and simple, the nouveau-garage clatter of the Kills has magnificently sat on a line between base and brilliant. They've traded in a bluesy, overdriven sleaze that's served many a duo well in recent years, blurring the edges between their tandem vocals, staccato guitars, and vintage drum machines. On albums such as Keep on Your Mean Side (2003) and No Wow (2005), they managed to take a classic rock template and turn it into something more modern and audibly dangerous. Midnight Boom pushes those edges even further, and has its own kind of swagger that stands apart from anything they've done so far. Despite hammering on its titular phrase like it's a lip gloss for sale, opener "U.R.A. Fever" manages to sound like an XTRMNTR outtake that substitutes seduction for violence, with a slinky backbeat made from equal parts purring bass and jarring phone noise.
Many Kills reviews suggest romance in between the two principals-- Alison "VV" Mosshart and Jamie "Hotel" Hince; the masterfully sustained tension of their previous music practically invited the guesswork. But in comparison, Midnight Boom is limp. The album's beat-heavy inclinations are supposedly inspired by playground chants (specifically a film documentary called Pizza Pizza Daddio), which is easy to pick out from handclaps and martial drumbeats that run through almost every track here. But that same inspiration extends to the sing-song vocal melodies, and much of the lyrics. Now, lyrically, the Kills never had to do any heavy lifting; so long as the words sounded vaguely sexy and/or badass, they fit perfectly. However, the tawdry cheerleader chanting of "Cheap and Cheerful" quickly move past intriguing to inane, and the wordless chorus of "Getting Down" recalls all the inspiration and verve of the Greg Kihn Band. They just don't write 'em like that anymore, and with good reason.
The saving grace of Midnight Boom is the Kills' desire to break these songs open and see how they work, what makes them tick. The beat-first approach is just window dressing on tracks like "Cheap and Cheerful" (despite some production help from Armani XXXchange of Spank Rock; maybe the remix will fare better), but others like "Tape Song" jump from coy and insinuating to the album's most blistering chorus. Throughout, Mosshart's vocals are fuller and reflect more character than before. On one of the best rock songs I've heard so far this year, "Last Day of Magic" trades the stiff pinball plink of its verses with a tease towards catharsis on a tantalizing two-chord chorus that gets a little longer with each return, until it's finally revealed unmolested as the song's melodic anchor in maybe the last half-minute. By the time you get the full impression of the song, it's over. It's a great trick of rearranging that pulls back the curtain dramatically, but nearly every other song on Midnight Boom seems to be waiting for this kind of moment, losing it to a pile on the cutting-room floor.


Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color is where the political agitation of The Undisputed Truth and the social humanism of Us intersect, and there's no vague platitudes or defeatist cynicism here. Ali is a man with a purpose and zero interest in holding back.

Brother Ali: Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color

When it comes to giving a fuck, Brother Ali just doesn't give a fuck. He will run up in foreclosed houses in North Minneapolis with a crew of neighborhood poverty-fighting activists and end up in the back of a squad car for it. He'll antagonize his tour sponsors when they get cold feet about his lyrics, like in 2007 when Verizon cut off their endorsement in the wake of "Uncle Sam Goddamn". And when given the opportunity to hide behind somebody else's "post-racial" melting-pot narrative that portrays him as some kind of cultural outsider ("the blind albino Muslim rapper!"), he publicly owns up to his place of white privilege, keeping full recognition of the advantages he was given even as he holds pride in adhering to the tenets of what's still treated in America as a minority faith. He has all the work ethic and self-respect of someone who doesn't worry about what other people think, and all the community awareness and sense of justice of someone who can't picture anything more important than what other people think.
As much as he's solidified his place in the indie rap game, Ali always seems like he's in the process of working out new things-- how to best balance out his roles as an artist and an activist, how to reflect on his past and learn from his mistakes and conflicts, and how to translate each new phase of his life and his experiences into work that maintains the precarious balance between being imposing and being humble. Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color is where the political agitation of The Undisputed Truth and the social humanism of Us intersect, and there's no vague platitudes or defeatist cynicism here. Ali is a man with a purpose and zero interest in holding back, someone so attuned to what it takes to move a crowd with his voice that he trusts in its power to let some complication and nuance support all the confrontational honesty.
Which is a good thing, because when Mourning in America gets political, at least in the early goings, there's not much in it to make well-meaning liberals feel better about themselves. The America that frustrates Ali is one that still has something to pull for, as he puts it in the Cornel West-featuring leadoff track "Letter to My Countrymen". With the idea that it's hard to want to better a country you're too defeated to see the good in, he sees hope in the potential of its citizenry from the ground up-- "It's home, so we better make the best of it/ I wanna make this country what it says it is". That it isn't what it says it is gets broken down severely in "Mourning in America", taking off from the familiar rhetorical device of contrasting first-world militarization and guerilla insurgency-- "terrorism is the war of the poor" and "warfare's the terrorism of the rich"-- to also get down to the essence of how that mindset doesn't even need another country's involvement, and how it eats America at the core with shoot-first police and for-profit prisons. And just as he stands looking at American society as someone who's in a position to benefit from its injustice but doesn't want to, he does the same with pop music for "Won More Hit", breaking down the music industry's entrenched exploitation of black artists and tearing at it from the inside. These are the words of someone who wants himself and his country to be exceptional and powerful and successful without somebody else needing to suffer to make that happen-- any other victory would be pyrrhic.
Of course, there's that something in Ali's voice that makes being preached to feel rousing instead of tedious. He builds verses that, while rich with wordplay, never let cleverness get in the way of clarity. Not that he doesn't get clever-- the bait-and-switch jokes of "Need a Knot" are a bit corny but sly nonetheless, even when the clean-cut punchlines to the narratives about how he used to "move white" or "chop green" play their hands. And there's always the notion he practices-- that making every word and sentiment crystal clear not only gets the message across but the raspy yet booming impact of his flow too. So when he uses that voice and that lyrical bluntness to lay his personal life bare, it puts a resounding weight behind it, one that feels honest to a fault. Detailing how he had to cope with a grueling, crew-fracturing tour itinerary upended by his father's suicide and the death of close friend/fellow Minneapolis rap mainstay Michael "Eyedea" Larsen in "Stop the Press" turns what could have been straightforward autobio into a clash between vulnerability and willpower. And "All You Need", where he has to address his neglectful ex-wife and tell his son why his mother isn't around anymore, does a grown-man job of placing the blame where it stands but makes sure to keep empathy in the picture: "I know you wonder why your mother does the things that she do/ Well, it's not 'cause she doesn't love you/ It's because she grew up in something they call 'foster care'..."
Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color is more of a refinement than a deviation for Brother Ali, even though there's one prominent change that could set off questions-- the departure of longtime producer ANT, who was unavailable while on tour with Atmosphere. Taking his place for full production duties is Seattle's Jake One, who maintains the Rhymesayers family connection and should have all the cred he needs solely on the back of White Van Music collaboration "The Truth". That precedent's met well on this slate of beats-- not too distant from the vibrant soul of Us, but a bit more upfront and varied, versatile conceptually (the pseudo-trap of "Need a Knot") and characteristically (the seething heavy funk of obligatory step-to-this-mic-and-get-fucked-up cut "Say Amen"). And Ali adjusts his flow and cadence accordingly-- he flips more variations on his delivery than any of his previous releases, and any illusions that he's one-dimensional in any respect are finally and fully eliminated on this album. That doesn't just go for his voice or his lyrics or his subject matter; it feels true to the man himself. If that means working out how much of his politics are personal and vice-versa, so be it. He contains multitudes.


Ann Arbor producer follows two well-received instrumental albums with a set dominated by guest MCs, including contributions from Beans, Wildchild, and Guilty Simpson.

Two/Three

Tadd Mullinix (aka Dabrye) is a multi-monikered, hip-hop-hungry, electro-leaning music producer. You know, like Scott Herren (aka Prefuse 73). But since Prefuse crashed hard with the guest-ridden debacle Surrounded By Silence last year, there's now room for a "next Prefuse," whether anybody wants one or not. When I saw Dabrye open for Prefuse back in 2003, most of his solo set was low-key and passable. Then, near the end, he started to lace his synth-heavy, moon-boot beats with bits and pieces of sampled raps, at which point the crowd went nuts (relatively), nodding their heads with a measured amount of intensity. Now, Dabrye is running with that energy, following up his two nice enough instrumental albums with Two/Three, which-- like Surrounded-- features many real-life hip-hop vocalists. And-- like Surrounded-- the outcome isn't nearly as ecstatic as one would hope.
The producer's singular Timbaland-meets-the flipside of Low rumble is more focused and intricate than ever, but his underground MC guests continually falter with convoluted rhymes that rust up Dabrye's menacing robot bounce. At the jump, when Lootpack alum Wildchild proclaims "It's time to take a stand...speak for those who don't have a chance to speak," he's ostensibly talking about (to?) the "youth," but his anti-flow quickly turns into a blithering mess when coupled with Dabrye's tricky undulations. Then there's Kadence, who spends 96 percent of his waking life practicing the "furrowed brow" in the mirror while reading No Logo and taking notes. Those notes eventually turn into raps like: "I'm gonna keep spittin' this shit until people internalize it/ It's all a matter of what you subjectively circumscribe to/ Envisioned through designer sunglasses you hide behind at night/ Signifier of a colonized mind." Signifier of a polite mind that's trying to hide closed eyes is more like it (i.e., dude is an instant drowzer). "Can a rapper be socio-philosophical and still affect y'all, is it possible?" he whines on "Encoded Flow", as if it's our fault he's not Chuck D. And then Beans, who is contractually obligated to appear on every indie-rap producer's "MC" record through 2017, shows up and does his little non-sequitur tinkle, purposely missing the bowl and thinking it's really cool. It's not.
Hope comes from the unexpected talents of Detroit's Guilty Simpson, a favorite of the late Jay Dee. Simpson isn't a prodigy and his verses are being graded on a curve against the rest of album's bullshit bunch, but still, there's a sense of release when he bounds onto "Special" with a sly gangster lean: "I'm tired of being humble/ From here on out I'm brash/ Hot dog with extra flash." As Dabrye's creepy crawler bass bubbles and scatters, the MC shows what Two/Three could be if the rappers were chosen based on entertainment value rather than how hard they're trying to save rap with big words. There's a natural cohesion between the producer's wicked slithers and brutish barbs like "You ever seen a hundred crooks on the grind that'll put it through your window when you look through your blinds?" Here's hoping Simpson and Dabrye get to hook up again in the future.
The record's last track, "Game Over", is another reason to believe in Dabrye's futuristic vision. The rhymes from Motown heavies Jay Dee and Phat Kat are generally inane ("Who keeps the fuse lit?/ New shit!") but the hometown bully vibe-- and the track's Dilla-inspired sparse drag-- is appealing. The beat, a grittier twist of Dabrye's own "This Is Where I Came In" from 2002's Instrmntl, could be the mind-tweaker's finest hip-hop moment yet, with Martian pulses, sinister chords and pitch-bending cartoon noises morphing into something funky and vicious. If he can stay away from wordy know-it-alls hell-bent on disrupting his groove, Dabrye has the potential to make an album as gripping as Prefuse's One Word Extinguisher. As for now, all we can do is wait on an instrumental version of Two/Three...and an enterprising fan to mash it with rhymes worthy of its diabolical creep.


Buoyed by Afrobeats producer Sarz’ nostalgic, ’80s-influenced production, the Nigerian-born, London-based singer turns his attention to romance, exploring a gentler side of his voice.

Sweetness EP

On last year’s soul-baring Which Way Is Forward?, Obongjayar brought a light touch to weighty subjects like racism, war, and the desperation of making ends meet. One of the most striking things about that record is how the Nigerian-born, London-based artist, aka Steven Umoh, manages to express such lofty ideas with such graceful economy. He has a poetic ear—“The night had us drinking soap/To wash off the ugly,” he sings on “Frens”—and an angelic voice, husky and sweet.
But Sweetness, a four-track EP with Afrobeats producer Sarz, whose credits include records with WizKid, Drake, and Skepta, shows a different side of the singer. The most immediate difference is thematic: In place of songs about self-knowledge and social ills, Obongjayar turns his attention to romance. He rhapsodizes about a lover on the title track, his voice slipping into falsetto as he sings, “Taste like strawberry, mango, pineapple juice,” tapping into the age-old conceit of comparing an object of affection with inanimate objects. On “Gone Girl,” he bemoans the growing distance between himself and his partner: “Baby, lately when I hold you, you’re/Missing, I wish you were here,” he sings mournfully, before slipping into a ghostly chorus whose repetition of the word “zombie” faintly echoes Fela Kuti’s incendiary classic.
But the more important changes are stylistic. Obongjayar’s husky voice has mellowed, developing a whispery flourish. Perhaps that’s a reflection of his newfound vulnerability, or perhaps it’s a response to Sarz’ influence. On previous records, Obongjayar favored minimalist production that made voice the center of attention. But Sarz’ beats, while smooth, are more muscular. In taking over the console, Sarz has allowed Obongjayar to stretch out and explore the nuances of his voice.
The mood is surprisingly nostalgic. The first three songs borrow heavily from ’80s R&B. “Sweetness” is built around chiming keys and staccato synth bass; the moodier “Gone Girl” loops Obongjayar’s falsetto around a slow yet driving 4/4 beat; “If You Say” sounds inspired by early Sade. But the closing “Nobody” breaks from the template. Sarz’ crisp percussion returns to the fore, balancing dembow syncopations with a steady house groove. The change in style seems to have had a liberating effect on Obongjayar, who rises to the occasion with some of his most playful verses on the record, lyrically (“Body like sin/She put it on me/She make an angel catch a felony”) but also tonally, as he dances around the spaces in the beats. If Sweetness’ first three tracks sent Obongjayar and Sarz looking to the past for inspiration, on “Nobody” they are doing what both do best: mapping out a new musical future.

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This intimate, conversational EP from East London R&B producer/singer Azekel isn't reinventing the wheel. But his attention to detail is rare, and results in a record that feels impulsive, risky, and polished all at the same time.

Raw, Vol. 1

The soulful, electronic R&B that Azekel makes has been undergoing a renaissance in the last few years. With Raw, Vol. 1, however, the self-produced singer winnows out a slice of this familiar territory and advances it with a distinctly British sensibility. Not only is Azekel doing all the singing, songwriting, production, engineering, and mastering on Raw, but standout singles like bass-heavy "Chronophobia" and "Mad About the Boy" suggest that there is a quintessentially London R&B sound, and that this, more specifically, is it.
The EP has an intimate, conversational atmosphere. Production flourishes peek out from every corner of the mix, from the purposeful, jolting radio fuzz on early single "New Romance" to the errant sirens and clips of presumably real DJs talking about Azekel on "Late Intro". Interludes like this make the EP sound like a late-night mood mix on the BBC—all vaporous voices and distant chatter over smooth, immersive ambience, crafted to sound incidental.
Raw Vol. 1 has a pretty solid narrative arc for an EP—from roiling statement singles like "Chronophobia" to the reflective closer "Sold My Love". Lyrically, however, Raw favors the oblique, with Azekel singing ingratiating lines ("I've been watching you watch me"; "Sweet love, I've paid my dues") that occasionally feel redundant. The downtempo soul of "Holy Matrimony" provides the best example of the vocal styling that sets Azekel apart: the lilting falsetto, the tremolo, the manifold ways his voice molds and shapeshifts to underscore the production, rather than the other way around.
There is room in this spacious music for small, experimental touches that don't announce themselves—from the harmonious, intergalactic fade out on "Holy Matrimony" to the womping bassline on "Chronophobia", which is later underscored by a beat that sounds like someone clicking their tongue. It's a unique touch that's characteristic of Raw, Vol. 1—Azekel isn't reinventing the wheel, but his attention to detail results in something rare: a record that feels impulsive, risky, and polished all at the same time.


Alice Coltrane’s newly reissued Lord of Lords capped off a trio of richly orchestral albums in the early ’70s. It is a slow-building, cosmic, unnerving throbbing organism of sound.

Lord of Lords

Most artists who devote themselves even fleetingly to religious music don’t do it well enough to earn many converts. Dave Brubeck’s oratorios have nothing on “Blue Rondo à la Turk” and Bob Dylan’s evangelical era is overshadowed by his earlier work. But Alice Coltrane’s devotional music—particularly World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, released last year, a decade after her death—now earns more plaudits than the string of albums she recorded in quick succession for the Impulse! label in the late 1960s and early ’70s, just before she foreswore secular life, moved to California and established an ashram in the Santa Monica Mountains.
The last of those albums, 1972’s Lord of Lords, is now being reissued on vinyl by Superior Viaduct and it may be the most ecstatic record she made. The music—unnerving, slow-building, a throbbing organism of sound—is cosmically cinematic. Lord of Lords was the final and most fully realized installment in a trio of albums—the others are 1971’s Universal Consciousness and 1972’s World Galaxy—that put Coltrane’s jagged orchestral arrangements alongside her dark, rumbling piano, arpeggiated harp, and Wurlitzer organ. (Bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Ben Riley are relegated to the sidelines.) These works represent a radical turn away from Coltrane’s previous records, which for the most part operated very much in line—stylistically and spiritually—with the kind of modal, swing-oriented jazz popularized by her husband and occasional bandmate, John, who died in 1967.
It isn’t fair to Alice’s work to speculate as to whether she was furthering John Coltrane’s legacy with Lord of Lords. None of the stuff John did in his brief but productive life suggests that he would have gone in this direction—and we’ll never know for sure. Density, however, was something he seemed to think a lot about toward the end of his life—witness The Olatunji Concert—and Lord of Lords is nothing if not dense. That’s mostly because the orchestra—at 25 instruments strong, way larger than any string group she’d recorded with before—exists to provide melody as much as texture. The violins, violas, and cellos work in unison, putting forth lines that smuggle in gospel phrasing, like a Duke Ellington composition but more abstract.
This album is less deliberately expressive than the stuff Coltrane had already recorded, including the blues-drenched “Turiya and Ramakrishna,” from her 1970 album Ptah, the El Daoud, and “Gospel Trane,” from her 1968 solo debut. Lord of Lords consists of three searching, original compositions alongside two covers: “Going Home,” the spiritual based on a section of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, and “Excerpts From the Firebird,” which incorporates some of the melodies from Stravinsky’s suite. In the liner notes, Coltrane writes of “receiving a visitation from the great master composer,” nearly a year after his death in 1971. In the vision, Coltrane recalls, Stravinsky brought her a vial of clear liquid, which she drank. “Divine instruction,” Coltrane writes, “has been given to me throughout the entire arranging of this music.”
By the time she made Lord of Lords, Coltrane was moving away from jazz and heading toward a kind of spiritual music that used drones and chanting and lots of organ. She had recently traveled to India with her guru, Swami Satchidananda, and she was on her way to becoming a full-blown swamini herself. But she never entirely abandoned her roots. Coltrane was reared on gospel music in Detroit churches and mentored for a time by Bud Powell—and on Lord of Lords you can hear the vestiges of bebop in her fleet-fingered organ improvisations. Whether or not Coltrane’s influence extends into modern jazz, however, is harder to discern. Her music was, philosophically speaking, focused on the universality of being—a “totality concept,” as she called it—but it didn’t actually sound all that universal. Lord of Lords is an especially stark example of the single-mindedness—the oneness—of Coltrane’s vision.


The full-length solo debut from the former Crystal Castles singer is a dark, extreme pop record about abuse, power, and regaining control.

Prey//IV

Recovery doesn’t follow a predefined path. For survivors of domestic violence and abuse, there can be an expectation to play the perfect victim: to heal quickly and quietly, to sublimate their own personality into a model of strength, resilience, and grace. For Alice Glass—who left Crystal Castles in 2014 and in 2017 issued a statement alleging abuse at the hands of her former bandmate Ethan Kath—the process of recovery is manifested through vivid depictions of body horror, resentment, and revenge. Glass uses her solo work to enact violent fantasies over glitchy synthesizers and drum loops, painting a bleak and bloody picture of womanhood. In other words, as she puts it on her debut solo album PREY//IV, “Watch the hunter be the hunted.”
PREY//IV is Glass’ full-length follow-up to 2017’s eponymous EP, which communicated the panic and anxiety of a violent partnership through rushed, pitched-up squeals and the mechanical lurch of muscular basslines. Now, her words have a clearer target. Power, in its many permutations, burns at the core of the record. She often twists her perpetrator’s words against him, a perverse form of exposure therapy: “You’re not worth believing,” she mews on the shuddering “Pinned Beneath Limbs.” She returns to that approach, emboldened, on “Fair Game,” a terrifying highlight where Glass takes on the persona of her abuser. “I’m just trying to help you,” she sneers flatly, before twisting the knife: “You’re insane.”
Glass examines all sides of her own survival, from chilling memories of her abuse to nuanced excavations of her murky subconscious, rendering the contradictory desires born from cruelty. Glass plays up the deviant nature of dominance and submission on “Everybody Else,” sounding a bit like a haunted doll covering “I’m a Slave 4 U” as she sings about being tied up and losing control. During a spoken word passage on “The Hunted,” she stands over her captor, savoring their role reversal: “Now, when you’re suffering/I’ll smile.” PREY//IV is also a reflection of the ways she’s turned her abuse inwards, featuring images of self-harm scattered throughout: “Did you forget my own knife could cut me?” she sings on “Baby Teeth.” Just because she’s escaped doesn’t mean she’s no longer hurting.
As on her EP and recent one-off singles, Glass collaborated on these brooding and explosive songs with producer Jupiter Keyes, formerly of noise rockers HEALTH, and leans more heavily on beat drops and blown-out basslines than its predecessor. Glass spent the years following the release of her EP participating in a growing community of alternative ravers through Los Angeles club nights like HEAV3N and remote events like Club Quarantine, where she befriended producers like Dorian Electra and SOPHIE. Her sound has moved with her toward the dancefloor: “Baby Teeth” evokes the dark thump of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face”; “Pinned Beneath Limbs” sounds like a SOPHIE deep cut via the tremor of the industrial punk of a Posh Isolation record.
Like her avant-pop contemporaries, Glass sees pop as a genre of extremes—whether that’s bubblegum cheerleader chants (“Love Is Violence”) or breakbeats that reverberate like they’re meant to break your speakers (“Witch Hunt”). But she incorporates spookier sounds to match her grisly subject matter—a toy piano on “Everybody Else,” a growling wild animal on “The Hunted,” crackling static at the opening of “Fair Game.” Glass’ voice adds an acrid putrefaction to her pop. She’s called early riot grrrl singers an inspiration, and her snotty screams on “Suffer and Swallow” and “Love Is Violence” echo Kathleen Hanna’s Valley Girl venom. At the same time, she also calls voice actor E.G. Daily, who played Tommy Pickles in Rugrats, one of her favorite singers, and uses little coos as a foil to her jagged edges.
On PREY//IV, Glass finds a voice that was silenced and distorted by abuse and manipulation; if anything, her first solo full-length can feel overwhelming, boiling over with so many vocal and musical experiments that don’t always cohere. Rather than sever her ties to her former band, she frames the record as a reclamation of her art from a cycle of abuse. The Roman numeral “IV” in the title is a reference to her previous band’s trilogy of albums, a gesture to show how she views the record in conversation with her work in Crystal Castles, rather than a rebirth; it’s only natural that there’s lingering trauma in such continuity. PREY//IV opens and ends with wordless incantations over windswept synths, like a cold front blowing in. The rest of the album, then, is the vicious storm—unpredictable, unruly, and destructive to everyone in its path, even its creator.


Jeff Tweedy's minimal production lets Richard Thompson's strengths shine on the intimate, thoughtful, complex, and rewarding Still.

Still

Decades into his career, Richard Thompson remains a perennial critical favorite, favorite of other musicians, and cult hero; his guitar work (hybrid picking, bizarre tuning, and soloing that never feels too self-indulgent) is unparalleled and his songwriting taut, brainy, dry and dark. Still is no departure for Thompson—it's a solid, stark record, expanding on and refining themes that wend their way through his significant oeuvre. But it brings a further depth and resonance to territory that will be familiar to longtime fans, and it's vivid enough to serve as an entry point for those new to his work. For a veteran like Thompson, it's hard to ask for more than that.
Recorded with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy at his Loft Studio in Chicago—Tweedy also contributes backing guitar and vocals on some tracks—Still feels extremely present and immediate. There's no studio frosting; it's like listening to Thompson and his band perform directly in front of you with no other noise or distractions. (Considering the many overwrought production missteps of the Mitchell Froom years of his career, roughly 1986-1996, Thompson has no doubt learned that spare production allows the unique beauty of his guitar work, solos that thread through the songs like copper wire, and the quality of his songwriting to shine.) The folk backbone that Thompson has carried from his initial background with Fairport Convention is still strong and evident on tracks like "She Never Could Resist a Winding Road", and he plays musically with the historical connections between British folk, Appalachian folk, and the blues on "Patty Don't You Put Me Down".
The characters in Thompson's songwriting are always struggling, never satisfied. They squabble, they leave, they ache, they are hollow, they frustrate one another, and they are unbelievably cruel to one another. This makes the occasional moment of tenderness and empathy, when written with honesty, seem less maudlin or manipulative than genuine. "No Peace, No End" is ferocious, all teeth and claws. Much in the tradition of "Al Bowlly's in Heaven" and "Gethsemane", two personal-political classics from Thompson's oeuvre, it's about the scars of war on both the soldier and the world around him. "Broken Doll" uses the incredibly heavy-handed imagery of a doll that can't be mended to describe a woman who has endured unnamed and unspeakable trauma, but as Thompson's male protagonist struggles to love a woman who hurts immensely because she deserves it and does not ask any reward for himself for doing so—material that in less deft hands would cause immediate and permanent eyerolling—he finds a bloody sincerity that makes the song stark, real, and kind.
The gender dynamics of Thompson's songs can arch toward the uncomfortable territory of Troubled Women Toying With Men, or Troubled Women As Romantic And Uncomplicated Objects, but his male protagonists are always presented as just as flawed as his females, and there's always an air of deep self-deprecation. In "All Buttoned Up", a woman refuses to fuck her male partner for reasons unknown, and he's incredibly pissed off about it, but he stays with her —because she's really great otherwise, and he cares about her.
The biggest weak spot on Still is his throwaway goofball song—in the tradition of "Two Left Feet", "My Daddy Is a Mummy", and other such live crowd-pleasers, it's a song about a pirate with the misfortune to actually be named "Long John Silver". "Beatnik Walking", in which Thompson pokes gentle fun at himself and his loyal fanbase (grown-up original hippies and jazz fanatics), is much lighter and more enjoyable, as is "Guitar Heroes", an ode to the artists who shaped Thompson's style and to the love of the instrument itself. One clunker on an album full of gems doesn't drag everything else down, though, and Thompson deserves all our respect—he's been through the major-label wringer, found his place where he can be celebrated as he deserves among his independent fans, and is still making complicated, thoughtful, intricate, resonant music on his own terms many decades deep into his career.


The prolific Australian psych-rockers deliver a thrash-metal concept album that doesn’t shred hard enough to stave off its overwhelming campiness.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation

A melodic motif emerges a few minutes into PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, the 24th studio album by the olympically prolific Australian rockers King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. A descending lead guitar flits across proggy opener “Motor Spirit” for just a few seconds, like a passing thought, and then, three tracks later, re-emerges as the theme of the more straightforward “Witchcraft.” The band has pulled off this trick before, to extremely fun effect. On their mid-pandemic companion albums K.G. and L.W., a lurching fipple fanfare started things off like the tattered end of thread on a spool and proceeded to spin around for well over an hour, changing color, never breaking. By the middle of the sprawling statement, the riff suggested outlandish associations—vaseline-smeared hammered dulcimer, Bollywood-biting Backstreet Boys—before landing, organically, on the same simple melody where it started.
If K.G. and L.W. are what it sounds like when King Gizzard’s constant-motion-as-muse approach works perfectly, then PetroDragon Apocalypse is the flip side: the odd dud that comes from never letting up. A spiritual continuation of their thrash-dabbling 2019 album Infest the Rat’s Nest, PetroDragon takes their thrash- and speed-metal worship one big step backward: a goofily operatic crash makeover that’s fun for maybe one spin but offers few reasons to revisit. It’s an unfortunately one-note album, even though it technically contains so, so many notes.
Where Infest at least took an earnest stab at paying homage to the band members’ teenage metal heroes, tracing yet another new identity with originality and some grippingly gritty highlights, PetroDragon Apocalypse dive-bombs into outright camp. On “Supercell,” frontman Stu Mackenzie growls out a first verse with several vague allusions to The Wizard of Oz, then delivers a biblical second verse before a call-and-response chorus propelled by a double kick drum coasts through a few times, uninspired. The very next track, “Converge,” does much of the same, with Mackenzie’s vocals once again clinging to various monotones for several measures on end, directing attention to the obligatory falsetto wails and blast beats. All of that happens before “Gila Monster,” the baldly incoherent story’s introduction of the beast and the least serious track of all, in which Mackenzie rhymes “I’m the gila” with “Godzilla guerilla,” among other shards of psychobabble, before the song ends on a boilerplate-y (though still impressive) speed solo.
On the last two tracks, which each stretch for more than nine minutes, King Gizzard finally flex their talent for switching things up and catching you off guard, instead of just brandishing their metal bona fides. “Flamethrower,” the album’s closer, ends by briefly and intriguingly imagining a thrash album that’s both blippy and sinister, but it’s too little, too late for PetroDragon Apocalypse. The whole thing might be the soundtrack to the Star Trek: A Klingon Challenge Interactive VCR Board Game. It sounds like what Buzz McCallister was rocking out to while feeding his tarantula.
Despite its razzle-dazzle, this is the rare King Gizzard release that actually sounds like it was composed as quickly as it was. According to singer and bandleader Stu MacKenzie, the narrative arc of PetroDragon and even the song titles came first; each of the album’s seven songs was then co-written from scratch in a day. “I guess we kind of made the record backwards,” he said, explaining, “It’s about humankind and it’s about planet Earth but it’s also about witches and dragons and shit.” By its very nature, a thrash concept album requires some suspension of intolerance for the overwrought, but give me the ones that go all-in on their concepts over one that makes me feel like I’m supposed to be smirking along. King Gizzard might have copped out this time, but such a misstep has little bearing on whether their next one will hit its mark: Their whole m.o. is to never stay in one place for longer than a blink—and part of that entails motoring through the occasional, inevitable miss.


The alt-R&B singer Mila J is Jhené Aiko's sister. Her collection of covers from R&B singers and groups feels perfectly selected, but lacks the sort of personal depth to progress the project somewhere beyond the amusing.

COVERGIRL

The difference between a well-executed cover song and recorded karaoke is all in the details. A truly great cover retains the essence of the original while transforming it. We've seen this done well throughout the years: Aretha Franklin's unmatchable wail on Carole King's "A Natural Woman," Whitney Houston's matter-of-fact depth and gravitas on Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You." On her Covers album, Cat Power infused enduring rock songs with melancholic heft, occasionally mutating the source nearly beyond recognition. In every case, great cover artists use another song to pull something intangible out of themselves.
That is a why Mila J’s COVERGIRL never quite hits the mark. The collection of covers from R&B singers and groups feels perfectly selected, but lacks the sort of personal depth to progress the project somewhere beyond the amusing. After years spent collaborating with other artists (Trey Songz, Omarion) and performing under a different stage name, Japallonia, Mila J (born Jamila Akiko Aba Chilombo) returned in 2014 to release her debut EP, M.I.L.A. The collection—featuring a collaborator on nearly every track—was a commendable if slightly forgettable collection of atmospheric tracks.
It's difficult to not draw comparisons to her sister, Jhené Aiko, but a quick listen to M.I.L.A. and COVERGIRL clarifies the differences. Aiko, despite her limited vocal range, has a confidence to her aesthetic: She understands just what kind of music she aims to make and surrounds herself with the right creators to help make it. On M.I.L.A., Chilombo’s tracks drown under the weight of its production and its collaborators, feeling less and less like an introduction to Mila J as the EP progresses.
In some instances, like the cover of Sade's "Sweetest Taboo," the production wraps itself too tightly around the original. In fact, it draws your attention to the more progressive construction of the original: Sade’s "Sweetest Taboo," (and really, the group’s entire catalog) survives and translates to numerous generations because it is so secretly challenging and charismatic and weird. Chilombo's cover, while technically "correct," strips from the ingrained eerie heart of the original, but doesn't replace it with anything else.
Consider another recently released mixtape (Erykah Badu’s But You Caint Use My Phone), which features a number of covers and reworkings of telephone-themed tracks. That record was brilliant and biting, digging deep conceptually to critique and cherish it's inspiration as well as dive into the psyche of Badu. Audiences should want the same from Chilombo. What COVERGIRL tells us most about Chilombo is that she is a music fan.


Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone, which arrives at a time of renewed interested in the pianist and singer's life and art, was co-executive produced by Ms. Lauryn Hill and features interpretations by Hill along with Usher, Mary J. Blige, Common, and others.

Various Artists: Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone

Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone is an incredibly difficult project to come to terms with. That's partially due to an inability to come to terms with Simone, whose penetrating breadth and pointed sagacity, to this day, remains a source of both comfort and discomfort to listeners. It's also because the project—co-executive produced by Ms. Lauryn Hill, largely produced by Robert Glasper, and featuring almost a dozen key artists—doesn't seem to ever come to terms with itself. It's a tribute to Simone's legacy, but in many ways, it's not.
Revisited arrives at a time of renewed interested in the pianist and singer's life and art, and as a companion piece to the must-see documentary W**hat Happened, Miss Simone? (Seriously, stop binging on whatever you're binging on via Netflix and push play.) In the past decade, the flame of Simone's heritage has been kept burning by Verve Records' Verve Remixed series, most notably on 2006's Remixed and Reimagined, which put the vocal stems of her RCA recordings through the mixers and production tools of a variety of DJs. The project featured renditions that not only updated a timeless artist, but also fostered inquiry about the voice, the phrasing, the poise that stood undaunted by all of the technology-assisted musical changes.
By contrast, Revisited relies on contemporary singers updating Simone, and sometimes not doing the High Priestess much proper worship.

There's issue to be taken with the choice of songs here. Numbers like "Ne Me Quitte Pas", "Sinnerman", "My Baby Just Cares for Me", and others, while being staples of Simone's live sets, are not her original numbers, reducing much of the album to covers of covers. Sometimes these work. Gregory Porter's rendition of "Sinnerman" translates well, but that's because Porter's voice—plaintive but confident—is suited to this kind of material, as he showed on the stirring "1960 What?" from his 2010 debut, Water. And the severely under-appreciated Alice Smith provides that album's best number with "I Put a Spell on You".
Haunting and pleading, "Spell" is not just a song, it's a moment of abject desperation—picture the Weeknd on his second night in an in-patient rehab facility, curled up in a corner with debilitating withdrawal symptoms, and you’re close. If it doesn't make sense to describe this song by using another singer as metaphor, that may be because it makes no sense to pay tribute to Nina Simone with a Screamin' Jay Hawkins song. Regardless, Smith owns the fuck out of "Spell", much the same way Jimi owned Dylan for "All Along the Watchtower" and Bobby Shmurda took "Jackpot" from Lloyd Banks to make "Hot Nigga". If there's any justice in this world, no one will ever cover "I Put a Spell on You" again, whereas Usher's Salaam Remi-produced take on "My Baby Just Cares for Me", might as well be a Sinatra tribute.
For her part, Ms. Lauryn Hill—who perhaps introduced an entire generation to Simone with the Fugees' "Ready or Not" when she rhymed that "while you imitatin' Al Capone/ I'll be Nina Simone/ And defecating on your microphone"—provides five songs here (six, if you count that she's credited with producing the remake of Simone's "African Mailman" instrumental). These are a mixed bunch. "Ne Me Quitte Pas" feels like a self-indulgent exercise to prove that she can sing in French; her remix of "I've Got Life" finds her not singing, but rapping—and pretty unconvincingly at that. In the same way that this project is sure to leave listeners wondering why Simone was important as a singer, "I've Got Life" leaves one wondering why Ms. Hill, full of empty narcissism and wordy pedantry, was very important as a rapper. Yet, when she's not sounding like a newcomer doing a poor L-Boogie impersonation, she comes through with a pitch perfect cover of "Feeling Good", and by the time she's running through riffs near the end of "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair", all is forgiven and we're reminded that Ms. Hill—a Black woman with classical aspirations, a dark-skinned Black girl posed as object of beauty, a pop culture fetish figure striving to be a social agent—has always been a generation's Nina Simone.
Still, what's missing here is Simone's voice. Even though it appears on the album's final number—full and deep and wide and light on "I Wish I Knew How It Felt to Be Free"—her metaphoric voice has been muted, akin to the way Kanye West covered her up with AutoTune on Watch the Throne's "New Day" and sped it up for "Blood on the Leaves", which turned "Strange Fruit", one of the most piercing songs in American history, into a mishmash about sidepieces and drugs and being down for your n-words. Simone's true endowment to culture is the steadfast way she engaged social issues and activated protest and love in her music. There's little of the fire and compassion that Nina Simone embodied on Revisited. (For that, it's urged that you check out 2008's excellent Protest Anthology, which mixed her more political numbers with contextual interview snippets.)
What is here is Jazmine Sullivan's "Baltimore", which while not a Simone original, should have, for obvious reasons, been put to much greater effect. "I'm never gonna come back here/ 'Til the day I die/ Oh, Baltimore/ Ain't it hard just to live," Sullivan sings strongly, but safely. It's personal, not political and it's disheartening. The album's most poignant political moment comes from Common, who breaks out of his placating Black coffee shop rap on "We Are Young Gifted & Black" to spit, "Mississippi, goddamned/ Ferguson, goddamned/ Staten Island, goddamned/ Baltimore, goddamned," but without the inclusion of Simone's signature "Mississippi Goddam", the line is sure to go over the heads of many.
With this shaping up to be the year that Nina Simone truly gets revisited—in addition to this album and the aforementioned documentary, there's a controversial biopic coming later this year—it's less important that this album do the job by itself of capturing Simone. (To be fair, not even What Happened, Miss Simone? does that.) Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone seems geared towards introducing a contemporary to the High Priestess of Soul, and how well it does that remains to be seen. The album's inability to get it right is a testament to America's inability to come to terms with Blackness and Black genius, which was always at the core of Simone's struggle. In that sense, it's the perfect tribute album—just not in the way it intended to be.


On their second album, the Vaccines have created a record about a rock band treating their job with the checked out disinterest of an office drone, doing the bare minimum to get by, learning nothing, and being scared to death by the obligations that come with appearing to give a shit.

Come of Age

The Vaccines are not joking. Just joking; they are joking. That seemed to be the takeaway of their debut, What Did You Expect From the Vaccines?, the title of which wisely tried to curry favor with the listener by shifting the focus from the unyieldingly competent lad-rock within to what the Vaccines wanted to be seen as their utter lack of complicity in being swept up by perfunctory hype. Maybe they had a point: Even if they were heralded by NME as the "Return of the Great British Guitar Band," their relationship with the press seemed like less a torrid love affair than a blind date based on type ("you two will so get along").
A year later, it's not surprising that Come of Age is pulling all the same tricks both musically and philosophically. On leadoff track "No Hope", Justin Young sings, "I don't really care about anybody else/ When I haven't got my own life figured out," and it's clear that the title points to a reprise of the debut's self-reflexive copouts. On Come of Age, the Vaccines prove they've done nothing of the sort. What they have done is create a quasi-concept album about a rock band treating its job with the checked-out disinterest of an office drone, doing the bare minimum to get by, learning nothing, and being scared to death by the obligations that come with appearing to give a shit.
As before, the music on Come of Age is wholly uncomplicated yet capable of winning listeners over by deftly straddling a very fine semantic distinction. Can you tell the difference between the figurative "you've heard this before" and the literal "you haven't heard this before" and want music to embody both? There's absolutely nothing the Vaccines do that hasn't been approved, market-tested, and confirmed over the past 30 years of British rock that warily views any encroachment of electronic music, hip-hop-- basically anything not evolving from the Jam-- as a threat. The faster numbers barge in with a "Brianstorm"-like whirl of drum rolls and tremolo picking, then immediately taper off. The slower ones pick and choose from any number of song structures you vaguely remember from whatever Drums or Strokes album you listened to last. Not a single band member seems capable of doing anything without the other three's approval: Vocal melodies move completely in lockstep with well-worn progressions, and occasionally just mimic the bass root notes. There's an occasional spray of surf rock, but otherwise Come of Age is utterly subservient to Young's lyrics.
The established templates make Come of Age catchy at the very least, even if Young treats his gift for sticky choruses like "No Hope" and "Aftershave Ocean" like something that would make him feel guilty if he decided to sell insurance for a living. It's fine that this is music driven by personality rather than innovation, but Young lacks the charm to be likeable or even the swagger to be unlikeable either. As a result, Come of Age becomes an inverse Portnoy's Complaint where the narrator morbidly fixates on the utter meaninglessness of every single one of his thoughts. Let him tell it: "I could bore you with the truth about an uneventful youth/ Or you could get that rap from someone else." "So let's go to bed before you say something real/ Let's go to bed before you say how you feel." "I'm no teenage icon/ I'm no Frankie Avalon/ I'm nobody's hero." "You can't hold a gun to my head/ Because baby I would just refuse." Even spread across the entity of Come of Age, it would be a disconcerting admission of serious writer's block or more likely crippling laziness. Those lines are all within the first four songs.
It goes on like this, as evidenced by "Bad Mood"'s surely self-aware taunt, "You look disappointed in me/ I'm not as thoughtful as you thought I'd be." More revealing is "Weirdo". Stylistically, it's the most outré inclusion on Come of Age, if only because its juddering bassline recalls Pixies and they're American. But the Vaccines pretty much reject any of Frank Black's lyrical lessons as Young pleads, "I'm not a weirdo," to win a girl's heart. You look further down the tracklist and, surely, a song entitled "I Wish I Was a Girl" is willing to cop to something? Sorta-- Young moans, "Life is easy when you're easy on the eye," and you might even overlook the deflating misogyny of that statement and find relief in the fact that he finally says what's been implied the whole time: He envies people who are expected not to have anything to say.
Which quite obviously renders the regular-guy shtick the Vaccines play on Come of Age as total bullshit, especially since you can purchase a deluxe version with bonus tracks and an entire extra disc of live cuts. It's as oily and slick-talking as any political figure trying to ascend to a position of tremendous power while convincing the populace they're "one of us," an easier path to take than simultaneously exhibiting leadership and empathy. But not even the soft bigotry of low expectations can suffice here since Come of Age hardly feels escapist. In fact, it's even more of a dystopian nightmare than Kid A or an El-P record: The Vaccines draw us into a universe that revolves entirely around Young, and if he's got nothing to say, his only possible conclusion is that nobody does.


Three musicians in their early twenties draw on the hedonistic rock'n'roll blueprint of the 1960s and 1970s on their beautiful, dazed debut LP.

The Shacks: Haze

It’s not easy to bring back the mood of a bygone era without coming across as a copycat, but that doesn’t stop new artists from trying. Take the Shacks, a trio of early-20s New Yorkers (singer-bassist Shannon Wise, guitarist-producer Max Shrager, and drummer Ben Borchers) who use British blues and rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s—the Animals, the Kinks, Fleetwood Mac—as their chief stylistic blueprints. On their full-length debut, Haze, they succeed in recreating a feeling of hedonistic rock‘n’roll bliss, but often end up with a Summer of Love-style dream that’s blithe verging on ignorant.
Haze is successful in showcasing the Shacks’ broad tastes, which also have room for everything from yé-yé and “Partridge Family” pop to honky-tonk waltzes. Their instrumentals feel like a collection of special effects the band wants to impress you with, and many of them are in fact impressive. On the title track, Wise’s haunting, mysterious vocals and Shrager’s banjo lick beckon the listener down a rabbit hole lined in shag carpet. That song eases into “Birds,” an escapist, “Tusk”-like tune about leaving NYC (“I left the city because my brain was fried”) that is one of the album’s most dynamic and animated moments. It’s also the third track on the album to promise a getaway, which raises the question: What are the Shacks running from? There’s no answer to be found in the silky crawl of “Sand Song,” where Wise’s dreamy vocals articulate free-floating worry without emoting the feeling at all.
That’s par for the course on Haze, an album that’s as beautiful and anodyne and dazed as a Petra Collins photograph or the poppy field scene in The Wizard of Oz. Much of the whimsy comes from Wise’s vocals: Throughout the album, she sounds like she’s cupped a hand over your ear to tell you a cosmic secret. Sometimes that approach works, as on the sensuous, endearing lead single “Follow Me,” but when she sings about faded love on “Blue & Grey,” she just sounds tired. “The way you make me feel is so good/But I can’t explain it,” she sings on “So Good,” only adding to the impression that the Shacks are stuck in a vague kaleidoscopic reverie.
On the surface, all these songs sound charming, but the magic dissipates when you pay attention to what Wise and Shrager are singing. Whether they’re harping on floral metaphors for love (“Let Your Love,” “All Day Long”) or cryptic scenes of mental fogginess (“Haze,” “My Name Is...”), the Shacks’ imagery is either cliché or confusingly nebulous. Haze is structurally elegant, but its vintage visions are hollow.
At their best, Wise’s distinctive voice and Shrager’s beautifully detailed co-production combine for a mesmerizing portrait of youth and desire, evoking scenes from a dusty psychedelic western to a wine-stained post-breakup bubble bath. Yet these moments are muddled again and again by lazy lyrics and mediocre, monotone moods. There’s nothing wrong with a narcotic high that can’t be put into words, but the Shacks haven’t figured out yet how to keep it going without killing the vibe.


With little to talk about aside from his girlfriend Halle Bailey, the YouTuber-turned-artist delivers an album that treats rap like just another piece of content.

Maybe It’s Me...

In just about every DDG interview, the Pontiac, Michigan rapper whines about an issue that we should all be sympathetic to: YouTubers aren’t being taken seriously as rappers. I feel his pain in my chest just writing it. It’s exactly what we need: more “content creators” in the hip-hop landscape.
DDG is part of a wave of popular YouTubers, streamers, and TikTokers who are boxing, wrestling, acting, podcasting, singing, and of course, rapping (because if you have enough followers, nobody really questions anything you do). He started posting videos in the mid-2010s while still in high school, and reached the million-subscriber mark in 2017—mostly through pranks, reaction clips, and vlogs documenting his relationships. To keep the content machine humming, he decided to become a bonafide rapper. After releasing a few diss tracks directed at other YouTubers, he dropped his first EP, Take Me Serious, in 2018. On its cover, he leans on a balcony and gazes into the distance—that way, you know he means business. By 2020, he scored a minor hit, “Moonwalking in Calabasas” with Blueface, a track that is basically just a knockoff of Gunna and Lil Baby’s Drip Harder singles. He apparently made an impression on someone, because the next year he joined the XXL Freshman Class. He’s really had a tough go of it. Won’t someone finally give this YouTuber his respect?!
Using the same wave-riding approach he applies to content creation, DDG slaps his name on music styles that are already proven to work. On Maybe It’s Me…, his extremely incurious new album, he rips off essentially every mainstream rapper you can think of. Rodeo-era Travis Scott? Sure. The intro, “Famous,” even has a sham Mike Dean guitar solo. Playboi Carti? Yep! “This Summer” is a Whole Lotta Red carbon copy so lacking in personality it could give Ken Carson’s X a run for its money. Drake? You betcha! “Hard on Myself” has all the ingredients of the OVO honcho’s AM/PM series—trust issues, emotionally destructive screenshots, cloudy beats, a very serious rapping voice. The swagger jacking is so blatant that it’s hard to figure out which lyrics, if any, are true to his experience. Please, convince me that you’ve heard of rappers who aren’t Rolling Loud headliners.
In the brief moments that DDG does let us into his life, things don’t turn out much better. On “Famous,” in an irritating, Auto-Tune-assisted croon, he breaks down the insecurities he has dating his girlfriend, Halle Bailey, the R&B star who played Ariel in Disney’s recent live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. “When you shoot your movie do these niggas turn you on?/When you leave the set, do y’all still text each other phone?” he asks, throwing a fit over a trend-chasing garage breakdown. Even though he’s trying to be vulnerable by opening up about how he feels watching Bailey kiss dudes on screen, it’s laughable to hear him rap about this chaste, kid-friendly movie like it has the sexual energy of Basic Instinct.
Other than dating the latest Disney princess, DDG doesn’t have a whole lot to rap about. He complains a bunch about fame on “Rizz,” but not with any feeling or interest. He doesn’t need the same emotional complexity as Future post-Ciara breakup, but c’mon, stop trying to look cool and be sincere about the difficulties of being in a relationship that is also tabloid fodder. “Rambo” is compelling, not because it’s that great, but because his shrill Don Toliver impersonation is spot-on. Maybe Bailey can get him a gig doing voice work on The Little Mermaid 2?
Then there are the three versions of “I’m Geekin”—one solo, another with LuhTyler, and a third with NLE Choppa and BIA—all of which appear consecutively on a 12-track album. It’s a passable song, with a sleek instrumental by Earl on the Beat that was probably sent to Lil Yachty first, but it is in no way strong enough to justify three versions. Yet it has a little bit of traction on TikTok, so three versions it is. This is what happens when you view rap as having the same low barrier to entry as vlogging and reaction videos. Maybe It’s Me… cares little about rap songs as art; it positions them as deliverables that will ensure the checks from sponsors and advertisers keep clearing. Here, rap culture is nothing more than a means to brand-building.


The Nashville-based William Tyler's second album for solo guitar in three years offers a lovely, rangy meditation on open-string drones, though Tyler has an uncommon way of making tangles of picked notes ring out like the melody of a searching pop song.

Impossible Truth

The Nashville-based William Tyler is obviously an amazing guitar player, but it takes some accumulated hours with his music before you begin to notice and savor his deeper qualities. Making an album of wordless solo guitar compositions that remains interesting for its duration is hard, demanding a range of subtle skills far beyond nimble fingers-- a fine, exacting ear for color, an intuitive sense of momentum, a mind for musical structures. These are fragile musical gifts, difficult to cultivate and even harder to point out, and they become even more fragile when the focus bears down on a single instrument: You are painfully exposed, both as a player and as a musical mind.
Impossible Truth is Tyler's second richly satisfying and absorbing record of solo guitar in three years. His finger-picking offers a lovely, rangy meditation on the power of the good old open-string drone, and if you listen closely, you can hear his searching intelligence animating every note. The cobwebbed cycle of chords that make up the center section of "Cadillac Desert" are played like an inner monologue, dimming and surging like a gas lantern. Tyler employs some of the same back-up instruments here as he did on 2010's Behold the Spirit; wisps of pedal steel guitar, stand-up bass, vibes and xylophone, softly glowing horns. But his guitar remains the single waveform bouncing through your headphone-space for nearly all of Impossible Truth's 54-minute running time, and it never once grows tiring.
Once you're fully immersed in Tyler's world, you'll probably stop thinking of his music as "solo guitar." He has an uncommon way of making tangles of picked notes ring out like the melody of a searching pop song. Many of the Impossible Truth's pieces trace the contours of a mood that feels similar to the Beatles' "In My Life": wistful, valedictory, touched by fatalism. "We Can't Go Home Again" opens with two chords that pirouette mournfully from major to minor, before easing with into a series of variations on a pentatonic theme that grow in forcefulness and confidence over three-and-a-half minutes. By the end, it feels a ringing refutation of the title's gloomy proposition. "A Portrait of Sarah", a tribute to Tyler's girlfriend, Sarah Souther, opens small-scale, singing a particularly romatic and sweetly ascending tune that eventually kicks into a romping double-time. It's a heart-filling moment, one of the only expressions of boundlessly personal joy on Truth. If there were words to this song, they would cheapen the feeling.
It also helps that Impossible Truth, like Behold the Spirit, is gorgeously recorded. Tyler's lines resonate a sonic space that sounds cavernous and chilly, like he's recording in a drafty, empty church. Although Tyler claims he was trying to escape John Fahey comparisons with this record, through the lived-in confidence of his playing and the sense of folkish ease settling into his compositions, he moves closer to the bracingly simple beauty that Fahey's music embodied. His strummed open chords on "Country of Illusion" even hint teasingly at Fahey's version of "Joy To The World," from the Christmas classic The New Possibility.
But as he moves closer to Fahey's spirit, Tyler sounds more and more like himself. Every melody he plays, like the one that opens "Last Residents of Westfall", somehow feels as it if was always there, a rare musical quality that only settles in after years of weeding out the quotations that have crept into your playing. Once you've reached this rarefied air as a player, whatever your musical mind touches will come out transformed, and Impossible Truth is music of almost metaphysical calmness, in which Tyler's guitar surveys inner vistas and notes their vastness with a kind of Zen detachment.


DJ Richard's debut LP is one of house and techno's best records of the year. Equal parts American and European, analog in feel, melancholy in mood, rough around the edges, and yet still unmistakably elegant, Grind is as expressive as techno gets.

Grind

From its cover, DJ Richard's Grind looks like a certain bombed-out species of noise record. It's got a black-and-white color scheme and an elegantly austere design, in the center of which a neatly centered photograph of a bridge rises, bleached and brittle as a wishbone, from a wintry thicket of trees. Those familiar with Rhode Island may recognize the structure as the Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge—and what is Rhode Island if not a longstanding hotbed of unorthodox electronics?
But Grind is not a noise record, even though its darkly lustrous synthesizers could probably serve as the foundation for a pretty blistering Prurient track. Like the Rhode Island native’s previous EPs for New York’s White Material label, DJ Richard’s debut album strikes a balance between house and techno: analog in feel, melancholy in mood, and rough around the edges, yet still unmistakably elegant. More than his previous singles, Grind serves as a bridge between European and American styles, perhaps as a result of his relocation to Berlin. Its patient, four-to-the-floor rhythms, consonant tones, and twinkling details are of a piece with German producers (and Dial regulars) like Lawrence and Roman Flügel, and the wistful shimmer of "I-Mir" and "Vampire Dub" echoes Kompakt’s resident sentimentalist, Superpitcher. But his unvarnished drum machines and torn-up textures have more in common with the brawnier approach favored by scrappy domestic crews like L.I.E.S., while his crisply jacking grooves go straight to the Midwestern root.
Far more than a formal exercise, though, the album is as expressive as techno gets, tracing a path from sullen mood pieces to bittersweet melodies to something that feels cathartic. It was recorded after two years spent living in landlocked Berlin, which might explain the vaguely coastal theme that surfaces in titles like "Savage Coast", "Waiting for the Green Flash", and "I-Mir" (the latter two are references to an atmospheric optical illusion occasionally seen at sunset). Above all, Grind comes across as a meditation on homesickness and distance; that’s particularly true of the album’s bleakest tracks, which are rooted in coldwave and dark ambient.
The album opens with a lowing foghorn dirge that brings to mind the bilious drones of Christoph de Babalon’s 1997 album If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It. It's one of several beatless, atmospheric tracks that help set the album's pensive tone: "Waiting for the Green Flash" sounds like a pitched-down approximation of the beatless closing minutes of Sonic Youth's "Expressway to Yr Skull", all brooding bell tones and trembling harmonics, while the monolithic "Ejected" sounds like a synth player's tribute to microtonal minimalists Tony Conrad and Phill Niblock. At first blush, these tracks might seem static, but turn them up loud enough and zero in on the shifting contours of their frequencies, and they truly come alive.
His beat-oriented work benefits from the same richness and subtlety. "Nighthawk", "Savage Coast", and "Bane", in particular, are examples of how to sculpt and layer relatively simple analog sounds so that they really sing. Richard's taste in synthesizers leans towards soft pads that beg you to sink into them, and he has a knack for contrasting those airy patches with tough, cutting drum hits that leave welts where they land. On "Nighthawk", a stretched and sandpapered wail in the background is both harsh and enveloping—a tactic that goes to the heart of the producer's keen sense of balance. He favors stuttering drum programming that suggests a mechanical kind of funk, and he is skilled at arranging contrapuntal lines into complicated but elegant orbits. Despite the outward simplicity of his productions, there's always something to tip their intensity levels subtly into the red. On "Screes of Gray Craig", it's the slight detuning of three or four separate synthesizer parts, so that they vibrate wildly in combination. And in the closing "Vampire Dub", a relaxing cut suffused in dreamy chords, it's the eerie, atonal bleating that burbles on like cosmic background radiation. Still, even at their most roiled, Grind's waters invite extended immersion. It's both one of the year's most sumptuous techno long-players and a masterful example of an unusual, bare-knuckled strain of ambient music.


Pearl Charles' debut EP is bursting with blues-rock and blissed-out psychedelia. Charles tugs at these sounds with her smoky alto, which gives off the kind of sensuality we associate with Lana Del Rey.

Pearl Charles EP

The hazy dreamworld of Pearl Charles' eponymous debut comes primarily from the '60s and '70s. The EP is bursting with blues-rock and blissed-out psychedelia. Charles is not a frontwoman whose voice soars over her band—she favors shadowy harmonies. Bedding every track with cooing "ooh"s and "ah"s, she buries her strongest writing in the midst of splashy drumming and cutting power chords. "What can I say to make you walk away?/ And make you understand that I don't wanna hold your hand?" she sings on "What Can I Do", rejecting the Beatles' decades-old proposal with indignance.
Charles' record takes cues from movements all over the American map. There are hints of Southern folk and alt-country, Midwest Americana, and West Coast acid rock. She tugs at these sounds with her smoky alto, which gives off the kind of sensuality we associate with Lana Del Rey. The femme fatale described in "Idea to Her" sounds like she could have been plucked from Del Rey's songbook, Charles' voice similarly toothsome and her tone nearly as coy. The seductress role looks good on Charles, and she takes it on again alongside driving rhythms on the rootsy "I Ran So Far". She coaxes her lover to trust her with their secrets, but in such a way that both she and the listener know she's lying through her teeth. When she vows, "Won't tell nobody else," it's easy to picture thick smoke curling away to reveal a devilish grin on her face.
When she recedes from the spotlight, the EP gets a little vague. "Night & Day" is Pearl Charles' most diverse cut, with a jaunty surf-rock chord progression leading into a twinkling piano glissando into spiraling, bluesy guitar lines. But Charles hits a snag, relying on the arrangements to carry her through dull lyrics and tedious "dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum"s. On the prismatic psych-folk track "Indian Burnout", Charles leans into then out of her words, singing with a slight Southern drawl recalling Emmylou Harris. It's a shaky ride but a magnetic one that doesn't reach for heights that would overpower it or push things too far.
The missteps are small and forgivable, especially considering her affinity for unexpected—but measured—choices. There are small but potent style decisions in many of these songs—rolling, ominous piano notes on "Idea to Her", rubbery, countrified strings on "I Ran So Far". It bodes well for a future full-length release. Here's hoping she continues to cultivate clear-sighted songwriting and an ear for worthwhile risk-taking.


Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley sound blissfully removed on their second album as a duo, in a quizzical world of their own creation. This one’s best played late at night.

Hippo Lite

It is increasingly impossible, these days, to feel truly alone. But Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley found a way, and on their second record as DRINKS it shows. Le Bon and Presley are each psychedelic geniuses of the 2010s: the former, a wondrous Welsh singer-songwriter and soon-to-be producer of Deerhunter’s new album; the latter, one of the sharper writers to emerge from the homespun California garage rock scene. For Hippo Lite, they retreated to a commune called Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort in southern France, a place known for its ancient fountains and silk museum—with, they mention, no wifi. DRINKS sound blissfully removed, in a quizzical world of their own creation. For that reason, Hippo Lite is best played in the late, isolated depths of night.
Hippo Lite is an album of peculiar grace: a mini-odyssey in quiet post-punk experimentation, brought to life with playfulness, eccentricity, and sly compositional sophistication. Madcap ideas are caught in mind-warping feedback loops. Batshit humor is mixed with the heart-tugging beauty of lovely, fingerpicked ballads. Atonal strings are lit up by strands of clever melodies, sung alternately by Le Bon or Presley. All of Hippo Lite’s strange sounds—a baby crying, a typewriter, a creaking door, ribbiting frogs, an inspired shaker—make it sound like a dada sound collage assembled in secret. For every classical element, there is a punk guitar, rudimentary beat, or wonky shout. Things that are “right” are constantly complicated by things that are “off.” Once you spend enough time inside the fragmented world of Hippo Lite, you’ll be caught wondering which is which.
As on many fantastic post-punk albums, space is liberally employed, and you feel as though you are listening in on DRINKS as much as listening to them—a witness to a process happening in the next room. Hippo Lite can be thrillingly episodic, like the oddest edges of the Raincoats’ Odyshape or contemporaries such as Palberta. For Presley’s part, perhaps his daring tastes were honed as a member of the Fall in 2006. (He impressed the infamously cantankerous Mark E. Smith with his lack of ego: “I’ve never met a guitarist I really like,” Smith wrote of Presley in his memoir. “He’s alright though.”) Describing DRINKS’ process, Presley has said in interviews that he’ll bring an idea and Le Bon will deconstruct it: “She’ll flip an idea upside down and look at it from a totally strange perspective... She comes out of Mars with ideas.” “Blue From the Dark” sounds like a twisted music-box. The slowly fragmenting piano figure of “When I Was Young” recalls an old black-and-white home movie. Surreal images lurk in every corner—when Presley mutters “do not mince words” on “Leave the Lights On,” it’s a riot.
The proper songs on Hippo Lite are the droll kind you might imagine DRINKS’ Drag City labelmate Mayo Thompson digging conceptually—honoring absurdity, stoicism, and humor at once, with an ethos of askew minimalism. Their wordplay is clever and often poetic. In the Le Bon-sung merry-go-round of “Real Outside,” it is immediately clear that “real” is qualifying “outside,” as in, it seems, outside society. “I wanna rest in the letter/Written outside/Your house,” Le Bon sings, a typically puzzling image. On the somnambulant “Pink or Die,” she recalls Nico with a line of especially elemental power: “Hallelujah nights/Winter sounds sincere/I am the color of here.” The closer, “You Could Be Better,” feels subtly political as Presley lists out all of the things you “could be” (“picture,” “ladder,” “bible”) and proclaims “everything edible eats you alive,” perhaps a way of saying that everything happens so much.
At the center and peak of Hippo Lite is “Greasing Up,” a staid and swaying folk tune, a composed foil to the freakery of its surroundings. “Greasing Up” sounds older than it is, and it rings of discovery in process, like finding a perfect book in the attic that you did not know was there, caked in dust. “If I decide/To come back to life,” Presley sings solemnly, “To be wide-eyed/Motion in mind/Cousins outside.” It comes over like an ode to their practice and to the willingness to stay inspired—and with that, to all creative practice that perseveres for its own sake. At a point, Presley conjures the lyrical image of “an orchestra/playing with you,” and there is not one present, but what a moving suggestion. “Greasing Up” carries a similar elegance, set only slightly aslant by the discordant drone that hums underneath.
“The world is absolute nonsense,” Le Bon said in 2016 around her excellent Crab Day album. “And things can be important to you, but you should never expect them to be important to other people.” There are grains of truth in that. Hippo Lite, however, feels like a precise instance of outsiders in communion—and the mysticism that occurs when weirdos help magnify the unconventional beauty of this absurd existence together.


So I'm playing with my new office chair right now. The floor of my apartment is wood-finished and extremely ...

The Last Broadcast

So I'm playing with my new office chair right now. The floor of my apartment is wood-finished and extremely warped, so there are all kinds of little bumps and valleys to roll over. Combine that with the fact that all the ball bearings and wheels are brand new and heavily viscous and I could amuse myself doing this for quite a while. I guess it's the simple things that give you pleasure after a long day at work, juggling projects and trying to get out of there at five. My job is pretty hectic and I usually come home all wound up, so it's good to have these little diversions to help myself. Tonight the stress has me feeling particularly goofy.
Normally I wouldn't think of Manchester's Doves as an appropriate soundtrack for this kind of mood, but that's largely because until very recently I was only familiar with their first album, 2000's dark, murky Lost Souls. On that record, the band showed their facility with dark, claustrophobic textures and muted melodic statements, only occasionally indulging their impressive pop sense. And while their latest offering, The Last Broadcast, could hardly be called a wholesale revamping of their sound, it concentrates mostly on elements that the trio kept very subdued on their debut.
For one thing, while Lost Souls was certainly nothing to sniff at, the band sounds infinitely more comfortable and confident here, placing more faith in their writing and relying less on production to put forth their ideas. The record still abounds with thoughtful audio details, mind you-- but here they're almost always employed in the service of melody. Even the exceptions to that rule-- the short instrumental tracks like "Intro" and "Where We're Calling From"-- build tension while moving toward the catharsis of the next fully-fleshed song.
"Where We're Calling From" is a dense wall of swirling guitars and keyboards, growing ever thicker until finally evaporating, leaving the initial strums of "N.Y." in its place. "N.Y." is exultant in its first verse, all crashing guitars and soaring vocals. The instrumental midsection is one the band's finest moments, cut through with an unobtrusive string section and some surprisingly dynamic interplay. "Let's go while we can/ Put your finger on the map/ Who cares where it lands," sings Jez Williams as the song gathers steam behind him. It's one of several tracks that makes The Last Broadcast a brighter, and in some ways more accessible, album than its predecessor.
Elsewhere, the band lay down a ream of excellent songs beginning with "Words," a steadily chugging confection of astral guitar, vocal harmonies and glockenspiel that does a remarkable job of boring a limited melody straight into your memory. It's followed by the loping, seven-minute "There Goes the Fear," which is a strong candidate for one of the band's best songs yet, its bounce befitting the subdued melody and diving, almost country-ish slide guitar that swoops in the background. Doves have always been a band who could come out swinging with a powerful pop song when they wanted to, and this just proves that they should do it more often.
A few songs naturally point back to the band's original direction, such as the haunting, noir "Friday's Dust," with its crystalline strings (arranged by Sean O'Hagan and Marcus Holdaway) and strange production. Devoid of percussion, the song floats along almost like something Talk Talk might have produced in their later years, replete with ghostly clarinets and odd smatterings of brass. Of course, "Pounding" bounces right back with a... well, pounding rhythm and a sterling melody, as well as some spirited rhythm guitar.
The boys get downright proggy on the intro to "The Sulphur Man," with sweeping strings deceptively setting the stage for what turns out to be a relatively modest song, albeit one cut through with all sorts of inventive little flourishes, like the strings that rise in the verses, threatening to overtake the vocals before abruptly backing down and retreating to the background, only to attempt another coup a few seconds later. It's those details that make a good song great, and that's what makes The Last Broadcast an easy record to come back to-- chances are you missed an awful lot the first few times you listened.
"Caught by the River" closes things on a high note, riding out on a sturdy acoustic guitar frame adorned by the band's usual sonic fireworks and pushed forward by some very economical drumming. To the listener's benefit, the electric guitar parts aren't so economical, and the band masterfully layers soaring leads, ultimately ending on a glowing bed of reverb and clean guitar. It's a fittingly dramatic end to an album that's full of drama, without the tiresome excess-- a healthy balance if you ask me. Watch your toes while I chair-speed back to the stereo to give it another spin.