Modern hardcore legends offered definitive proof of their staying power as our apocalyptic poet laureates on their latest, a demonic and harsh concept album about Armageddon.

Integrity: Howling, for the Nightmare Shall Consume

A word of caution: Dwid Hellion, Integrity’s vocalist and sole constant member, is not a man you want to fuck with. He’s not one for chit-chat; lend him the floor in an interview and he will go full Aleister Crowley, framing his nearly thirty-year career as an ceaseless campaign to rub the world the wrong way. “I am that moment when you would give anything to have a second chance, when everything has fallen away, hope has been lost, nothing is left to lose and when you start auditioning religions just in the distant hope that someone, something hears your cry and turns back the hands on the clock,” he proclaimed to the underground music blog Blow the Scene, in 2010.  Between his deep admiration for Charles Manson (he’s released the serial killer’s music through his label); his fascination with the Church of Holy Terror, a satanic cult; and that one time he allegedly nailed a human ear to someone’s door; Dwid easily stands as one of heavy music’s most incendiary figures, the G.G. Allin of modern hardcore.
Undoubtedly, the frontman’s masterful trolling catalyzed the Cleveland band’s rise to infamy in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Nevertheless, Integrity’s reputation as fire-starters is ultimately overshadowed by their role in shaping metallic hardcore as we know it. Without their revolutionary fusion of punk, metal, and noise–captured spectacularly on 1995’s magnum opus Humanity Is the Devil–bands like Converge, Full of Hell, Code Orange, and Hatebreed may never have existed.
With their new album Howling, for the Nightmare Shall Consume, Integrity have offered definitive proof of their staying power as hardcore’s resident apocalyptic poets. As with much of the band’s discography, the group’s latest effort it is a concept album, a timely one at that; It details the final days of humanity’s long, slow march to Armageddon, a blood-spattered tableau populated by burning corpses (“Burning Beneath the Devils Cross”), demonic serpents (“Serpent of the Crossroads”), and false messiahs (“Unholy Salvation of Sabbatai Zevi”), among other terrifying characters.
The End of Days being the sublime tragedy to end all tragedies, it’s only fair that Dwid and company mine the murkiest depths so as to ensure that its ecstasies are properly expressed. Its 11 tracks and assorted bonuses play out as a march through the circles of sonic hell, with Dwid as our yawping, spitting guide. The record opens with a cold blast of Scandinavian air (“Fallen to Destroy,” “Blood Sermon,” a punishing two-parter wherein guitarist Dom Romeo unloads a clip of piercing, winding riffs à la Darkthrone). After cranking up the heat with some molten beat-downs (“Hymn for the Children of the Black Flame”, “Die With Your Boots on”), Integrity pivot to anguished long-form, the album’s evil, epic heart: the sludgy “Serpent of the Crossroads,” which contrasts Dwid’s gravelly screams with Dom’s lithe, slithering fretwork.
As always, Integrity’s affinity for chaos supplies much of Howling’s latent gravitas, especially on the first few listens. The record’s lurching pace is powered by a bludgeoning type of bait-and-switch mechanic; For every extended, arduous trudge through the trenches, there’s a shot of good, unclean fun: “Die With Your Boots on”, “Burning Beneath the Devils Cross” and “String Up My Teeth” are three of the catchiest songs the band ever wrote, ragers situated halfway between Motörhead and Morbid Angel. Spin it a few more times, though, and a more disciplined, arcing dynamic emerges: a meticulous dynamic blueprint as old as the Book of Revelation, even man himself. Every temple, no matter how arcane, needs a structure–not just in terms of brick and mortar, but of spirit. Judging from Howling, for the Nightmare Shall Consume, that foundation isn’t just well-intact—it’s impenetrable.


The Vienna-based singer and musician’s second album turns to high-concept cabaret pop, exuding a cool melancholy that complements its textured production.

Harlequin

As a violinist, painter, founding DJ at Boiler Room, and former staffer at her label Stones Throw, Sofie Royer brings an inquisitive, curatorial touch to the music she now creates as a solo artist. Her debut, 2020’s Cult Survivor, was an idiosyncratic, ambitious album that specialized in lush 1980s-style soft rock. On her second album, Harlequin, the Iranian-Austrian musician retains its dreamy sounds but turns toward high-concept cabaret pop with heightened self-assurance and grandiose instrumentation. The music exudes a cool melancholy that complements its textured production.
As a teen, Royer studied violin in Vienna and played at opera houses as a member of the youth orchestra Junge Deutsche Philharmonie—experiences that seem to have informed Harlequin. In visual material and performances around the album, she adopted theatrical costuming inspired by the 19th-century Italian pantomime character Pierrot, taking the desolate clown as a model for her first singing gigs. “When I did my first live concert, I dressed myself and my band as clowns,” she said in a statement. “It felt like a protective armor from my regular self. I didn’t feel as vulnerable onstage.” The album uses theatrics to impart moments of heartache and despondency. Her vocals are honest and frank, with abstract production serving as an opulent backdrop.
Baroque overture “Schweden Espresso” embraces Royer’s early training, while its opening lyrics—“I step in the room/You’re not on the scene”—introduce the record’s theatrical concept. Throughout the robust arrangement, strings interweave with Royer’s rapturous, airy vocal timbre. On “Court Jester,” she grapples with an existential crisis over a playful production, briefly singing in German. Through an ADHD-medicated haze on “Baker Miller Pink,” her straight-to-the-point vocal technique makes a clunky line like “Not an original thought in that deliberately unbrushed head of hair” lie seamlessly across the song’s new wave tapestry.
The narrative crests as Harlequin reaches its second act on “Klein-Marx,” in which Royer envisions throwing herself from Vienna’s Kleine Marxerbrücke bridge. The bluesy “Feeling Bad Forsyth Street” transports us to the Lower East Side, recalling fellow Stones Throw act Mild High Club—particularly their heady 2016 album Skiptracing. Subtle strings coat the folksy song as a spaced-out Royer offers another antidote: “I let the realm get all up in my head/I talk to my Xans before I go to bed.” A wonky keyboard shapes “Ballad of Bobby Beausoleil,” an ode for the Manson Family disciple that surveys his film roles alongside his 1969 murder of Gary Hinman: It plays like a requiem for stolen youth.
The conceits can verge on pretentious, as on the two-minute orchestral composition “Sick Boy,” which name-drops Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe by her birth name, Norma Jean Baker. But behind the theatrical motifs and the shield of performance art, Royer has become a more expressive and distinctive vocalist after the deadpan approach on her debut. Harlequin ends with the piano-laced last call “Someone Is Smoking,” where she sings in a breathy register as she reconciles with nihilism: “I have traveled for so long/Only to find I’ve not come very far/I was made to do nothing/And from that, nothing comes.” At its heart Harlequin is an extravagant response to cynicism, as Royer immerses herself in an illustrious theater of the mind.


Past popes have released albums, but Pope Francis is the first to go straight pop. With collaborators that include a folk-swami, a theatrical lyricist, and a former member of Italian prog-rock band Le Orme, Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video.

Wake Up!

"Pope Francis releases prog-rock album" could only be a better punchline if the genre was swapped out with "chillwave," and nonetheless, here we are. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 78-year-old Argentine, is the 266th man to hold papal office; he is the first to directly condemn climate change and revive liberation theology and to have worked as a bouncer, and although past popes have released classical/liturgical compilations, Pope Francis is the first to go straight pop.
Pope John Paul II, for context, released three albums during his papacy. They consisted of classical sacred music, and none inspired fond remembrances by the executives who released them (the Pope's records "shipped gold and returned platinum", one industry insider recently quipped to Billboard). Pope Francis might be different: He is our meme Pope, the Pope of Kim Kardashian tweets and re-Vines. Just this week, he found himself the subject of a #Popebars hashtag that imagined him spitting raps by Eminem and Drake.  The Holy See's populace is growing increasingly unruly, and it's a trip to hear this confusion worked out musically in the age of Spotify.
With collaborators that include a folk-swami, a theatrical lyricist, and a former member of Italian prog-rock band Le Orme, Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video. It’s like you drank a bunch of cough syrup and went to Live Aid: The Vatican. Every track features a Barnes & Noble-CD-section pop instrumental, sometimes with additional choral or solo vocals, building momentum that halts when Pope Francis starts speaking. The opening track is "Annuntio Vobis Gaudium Magnum!", the Latin for "we announce with great joy." Following that phrase is an assumed "habemus papem," or "we have a new pope," and the excerpted speech is Pope Francis’s first one after being appointed. It’s a powerful moment to commemorate, only slightly compromised by the fact that the instrumental sounds like a holiday-themed IMAX.
The song titles in Wake Up!, exclamation-point-loaded and decidedly outré, are in many ways better than the songs themselves. There’s a climate change track ("Cuidar El Planeta"); another track whose title translates to "The Church Cannot Be an NGO!", and one in Spanish that translates to "Faith is whole, does not liquefy!" There’s a track in Italian whose title translates to "Do not steal the hope!", and a closing track in Portuguese whose title translates to "Do what he tells you!" Only the title track (in full, "Wake Up! Go! Go! Forward!") bears a name in English.
On it, Pope Francis speaks to a crowd after wheeling streaks of electric guitar, a cinematic horn section, the track gridded loosely by a high-hat. "It is a duty to be vigilant," he intones, to a crowd in South Korea, as a light revue piano tinkles in the background. "To not allow the pressures, the temptations and the sins to dull our sensibility of the beauty of holiness." But, if this album is the indication, beauty isn't exactly holiness's sound.
But there is something beautiful about this album; it exists. Pope Francis, already a more human papal figure than any in recent history, is humanized even further by this album's total musical awkwardness, its bewildering genre, its pluralistic good heart. The album's producer Don Giulio Neroni—who produced Pope John Paul II's 1999 choral album; the Vatican is on a relaxed release schedule, but a release schedule all the same—told Rolling Stone that he "tried to be strongly faithful to the pastoral and personality of Pope Francis: the Pope of dialogue, open doors, hospitality." He succeeded. Chill Pope, the leader of 1.2 billion people, urges you to accept this weird-ass album as your spiritual Genesis, your graceless way of saying Yes.


The latest album from the Washington, D.C.-based band led by songwriter and critic Elizabeth Nelson is smart, sturdy, reference-rich rock.

The Interrogator

The Interrogator is an ideal title for an album by Elizabeth Nelson’s hyper-literate band, the Paranoid Style. In her dual roles as a critic and singer-songwriter, Nelson prods and probes, putting the central tenets of rock’n’roll underneath an unforgiving spotlight. Her subjects often are artists whose tales have been told twice over, particularly on her lively X/Twitter account, where she offers tart insights on old warhorses from the Band, Van Morrison, and Prince. Her longer writing (including at Pitchfork) emphasizes her understanding of the inner workings of both songs and records, an intuition that manifests in the group she’s led alongside husband Timothy Bracy for over a decade. The Paranoid Style adhere to the gospel of three chords and overamplification; they’re true believers who don’t succumb to piety.
That long-running consistency gets a bit of a jolt on The Interrogator with the addition Peter Holsapple, a founding member of power-pop legends the dB’s (whose drummer Will Rigby also cameos here) and a onetime R.E.M. associate. Holsapple’s presence accentuates the Paranoid Style’s latent 1980s underground tendencies, adding a snappy restlessness that was absent on 2022’s For Executive Meeting. Placing The Interrogator within the lineage of college radio rock clarifies the Paranoid Style’s stance as cultural commentators—they linger on the fringe of the mainstream, understanding the form while questioning the intent. It also illuminates their kinetic appeal: “The Formal” roils to a jagged, dissonant clamor, “That Drop Is Steep” is propelled by a nagging, unnerving guitar, and “Print the Legend” has a descending riff directly reminiscent of the Pretenders’ “Back on the Chain Gang.”
Nelson can create vivid imagery with a limited number of words: Buried within “Print the Legend” is the pithy putdown, “They had a reasonable plan to make an ill-advised move.” Her true gift is cramming too many ideas into a confined space, delivering her lines with affectless speed that can require a lyric sheet to decipher the literary, political, and cultural allusions. Depending on your particular disposition, certain phrases might emerge from the racket—“Sure as you’re born, they bought me a short black dress” is a clear nod to Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land,” for instance—but recognizing the titular puns of “Are You Loathsome Tonight” or “I Love the Sound of Structured Class” isn’t required to enjoy The Interrogator; this isn’t a lecture, it’s rock’n’roll.
As a faithful disciple of Dylan, Warren Zevon, and Elvis Costello, Nelson is keenly aware that rock’n’roll relies on visceral pleasures to convey its intellectual thrills. Bristling with rockabilly shuffles, refurbished Bo Diddley bops, and post-punk rave-ups, The Interrogator has an industrial-strength swing to match the steely glint in its production. The crisp execution emphasizes that the Paranoid Style aren’t content to conjure rock’n’roll ghosts: They’re creating unexpected connections by refurbishing familiar parts. Nelson isn’t a revivalist—she’s in dialogue with history, fully aware that the past is not even past.


Gap Dream frontman Gabe Fulvimar lives inside the Fullerton, Calif., record store that also happens to be his label's office. Fittingly, his debut collection of loner power pop spans the gamut of styles you’d expect from a record store guy, i.e., Beach Boys, Eno, Can, Velvet Underground, and the forgotten bands that were influenced by them.

Shine Your Light

Gabriel Fulvimar lives in Burger Records. If you’re familiar with the Fullerton, Calif., garage-rock stronghold, pretend you aren’t and put yourself in the position of a person who only knows that the Gap Dream frontman is living inside of a record store that also happens to be his label's office. And not even one of those 90s mega-chains like Tower or Sam Goody that could pass for a luxury apartment. It’s not even Amoeba. It’s the kind of place that tends to thrive in the current economy, a nationally recognized local joint that caters to a faithful and specific demographic. But consider the logistics: does a Burger Records patron that’s just looking for an Unkle Funkle cassette run the risk of bumping into a shirtless, hungover Fulvimar if he happened to have a long night? Does he have a security deposit? Are you liable to find an opened box of Cookie Crisp in the vinyl section?
Jokes aside, Fulvimar’s current home address is the first step in establishing a narrative that steers you towards an optimal conclusion: the guy literally lives inside of a record collection! And it’s true, his new LP Shine Your Light does span the gamut of styles you’d expect from a “record store guy”, i.e., Beach Boys, Eno, Can, Velvet Underground, and tons of forgotten bands that were influenced by them. More importantly, you get the sense of what kind of guy would actually go through the hassle of living in such a place, as Shine Your Light aligns Fulvimar’s musical ambitions with a total lack of personal ambitions, doling out endearing songs about arrested development and short-term solutions that end up causing more problems in the long run.
As with Burger alums King Tuff and Ty Segall, you can apply the general tag of “loner power-pop” to Gap Dream, though unlike the aforementioned, it’s Fulvimar’s main thing rather than an aspect of his overall M.O. You can sense his ear for the canon: the unwholesome “Love Is Not Allowed” perverts the preciousness of round-like harmonizing in the style of Here Come the Warm Jets, the more rhythm-focused tracks make lo-fi approximations of T. Rex’s pretty vacancy, and you can hear a fake-it-til-you-make-it Kinks homage on “Shine Your Love”, where a regal horn chart is hilariously impersonated by MS-DOS synths more suited for King’s Quest. But for the most part, he’s more of a melody-first guy who demonstrates ingenuity over innovation and you never lose sight of how low the stakes are. The tools are crude and minimal—vintage drum machines, even more vintage keyboards, and underlying fuzz-rock guitars that put him well within Burger’s wheelhouse (or, garage).
Meanwhile, though Shine Your Light was inspired by Fulvimar leaving a go-nowhere life in Ohio after receiving an invitation to hole up in Fullerton, well...he’s arrived and “go-nowhere” means something a bit different. Judging from the majority of the lyrics, it appears that just about any personal intrusion or interaction with the outside world is too much for him to handle and he’d rather kick it alone. A new pair of boots gets Fulvimar in the mood to strut a little on “Fantastic Sam”, which is still presumably named after the sub-Supercuts hair salon chain. One song later, he admits on “Immediate Life Sentence” to getting out of the house for no other reason than to move his feet. He spends the rest of it haranguing a woman who tries to socialize him, snarling “you’re the kind of girl that wants to kill all my time,” even if the petulant tone makes him sounds like a guy who’s an expert time assassin. Note how the cruelest indignity is paying $7 for a beer, at which point Fulvimar vows “I don’t need to get laid that bad/ I’ll just stay home and get high.” Two songs later on “Shine Your Love”, that misanthropy has metastasized into full-blown nihilism—his voice curdles into a bratty snarl of “there is no past and there is no future,” and he proceeds to get blotto on a bottle of gin that itself probably cost $7.
More life-reflecting than life-altering stuff for sure, but the approachability (if not admirability) of Fulvimar’s P.O.V. establishes a personality that serves as a hook when the songs themselves don’t do much to distinguish themselves. Shine Your Light never gets oppressive, though during its final third, it does suggest what living in a record store might be like after the novelty wears out—kinda lonely, a little bit stuffy, and leaving you subject to others trying to tiptoe around, “you’re gonna move out eventually...right?” That remains to be seen, but for the time being, Gap Dream is Fulvimar’s means of  “trying to find a chill spot just to organize my mind.” The song from whence it came is, naturally enough, “Chill Spot”. Consider it his way of saying “mi casa es su casa.”


Mogwai's new album, The Hawk Is Howling, is the next iteration of the sound that began with 2003's Happy Songs for Happy People and continued with 2006's Mr. Beast: You get a handful of abbreviated heavy tracks, an equitable batch of somnolent drifts, and the occasional suggestive-of-the-future curveball.

The Hawk Is Howling

In 2003, Mogwai released their fourth full length, Happy Songs for Happy People, and its reception ranged from middling to favorable. Some praised the band's scope, grandeur, and willingness to explore beyond the bounds of the quiet-loud-louder dynamic it had mastered; others lamented a lack of the same, alternately calling Happy Songs too soft, too small, or too stiff. Happy Songs now feels like a summation of Mogwai's past, graced with good ideas for its future. Unfortunately, the music that led to that nexus has been much more compelling than what has emerged from it.
Mogwai's new album, The Hawk Is Howling, is the next iteration of the sound that began with Happy Songs. You get a handful of abbreviated heavy tracks, an equitable batch of somnolent drifts, and the occasional suggestive-of-the-future curveball. Just like 2006's Mr. Beast, Hawk follows an unevenly stacked 10-song structure, opening with a stately piano build ("Auto Rock" versus "I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead"), a ferocious follow ("Glasgow Mega-Snake" versus "Batcat"), and a drifting reverie ("Acid Food" versus "Danphe and the Brain") before allowing the middle sag into vacuity. The last three tracks of both records form suites of sorts: Track eight offers a hint of menace, which is reined in on a gentle follow-up before the closer amplifies it all. It's a sensible strategy, and The Hawk Is Howling is ultimately listenable, understandable, and vaguely likable. Like the songs that shape it, though, the album just feels redundant and tenuous, like the last empty cloud trailing behind a fierce storm.
Part of the problem, it seems, is that at its frequent best Mogwai's music is more than the sum of its instrumental parts. While the band's musicianship feels competent enough, the components themselves are rarely intricate or involved. Instead, the feeling pushed the songs through-- an unspoken understanding, it seems, that the band is arriving at some indefinable place, and we're just lucky enough to listen in. Neither the eerie majesty of "2 Rights Make 1 Wrong" nor the exhausting force of "Like Herod" are difficult to understand musically, but-- atmospherically-- they're brilliant, elusive, and mysterious. This partly explains why so many bands have pilfered Mogwai's trademark intervals and itinerant epic structures, even if they've gotten it wrong: Mogwai sound grand, but the stuff's not too hard to play. I mean, how many imitation Orthrelm's do you know?
But over the band's six full-lengths, there's been a steady increase in production value, in making the parts sound better or more perfectly tough and mean. So, while "Batcat" boasts viscous guitars and, in general, good mixing, its "savage" parts sound too self-conscious, almost as though the song's been flooded with alternate guitar takes that are mostly just pedals being twisted and turned to maximize cacophony. Unlike "Mogwai Fear Satan", for instance, it seems less the product of letting go and more the waste of deliberately meeting old expectations. The appropriately named "The Precipice" is a seven-minute ascent through a simple guitar pattern, vaguely resembling Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio. It sounds great, but it also sounds exactly like what you'd expect. Frustratingly, Mogwai don't seem dexterous enough to take chances within their old meme.
So, of course, the band tries new sounds, which is where Hawk really slips. Mid-album pair "The Sun Smells Too Loud" and "Kings Meadow" lean heavily on electronics, and they fail epically. "Sun" begins smartly enough, pitting a slim, serrated little guitar riff against wide, low bass tones. But a tinny synthesizer overruns the track, its frivolous notes rattling across everything. The track goes nowhere. In fact, Mogwai miss with most of the electronics on Hawk: The static whirs beneath the opening piano bars of "I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead" are trite enough to be a Christian Fennesz plug-in for GarageBand. "Kings Meadow" adds a layer of paint-by-numbers digital synthesis beneath chiming piano and guitar. It's texturally boring, distracting from the song's pleasant sway in favor of a bastardized Oval plea. Mogwai don't do this stuff well, and here they try to do it beneath structures they've used for more than a decade.
At the risk of contrition, I wish this wasn't the case. Mogwai-- for me and for many-- have meant an awful lot. There have been moments that I've wished all music would sound more like Mogwai-- brazen, strong, and redemptive or atmospheric, reserved, and cool. But the only reason I keep listening to The Hawk Is Howling is because Mogwai's name is attached. Hawk makes marginal stylistic advances that it could stand to omit, and it lightly retreads stuff that needs no recapitulation. I hope Mogwai make another great album soon, and I hope it sounds nothing like EP+2, Young Team, or Rock Action. Really, I wish Mogwai could just forget what "Mogwai" sounds like. Maybe then, they'd finally make another record that doesn't glance backward at outdated obligations. Mostly, though, I hope Mogwai doesn't make another album that sounds like Mr. Beast or The Hawk Is Howling-- that is, another bland reduction of splendid antecedents.


The slowcore band’s knotty and fascinating third LP delves into the question of what makes daily life so unnecessarily difficult.

A Healthy Earth

On “Commercial,” the centerpiece of Peaer’s third LP, a man has a nervous breakdown while waiting in line. Lead singer Peter Katz’s voice is barely audible, but the simmering tension should be familiar to anyone at the mercy of bureaucracy,  stuck in a queue and waiting for someone to recognize their plight. “I saw your commercial in the lobby,” Katz murmurs before his voice rises to a dramatic quaver that wouldn’t sound out of place on OK Computer—“Why does everything want to kill me in a million different tiny ways?” It’s not a rhetorical question. On A Healthy Earth, he devotes himself to unpacking what makes daily life so unnecessarily difficult.
Katz recognizes that “everything” trying to kill him is a man-made problem in some way—the rising seas, the blazing sun, even his shampoo: “I saw your commercial and now I’m scared/I use that product every day in my hair/I just didn’t know what it would do to me/I even gave it to my family.” But mostly, he wrestles with the everyday suffering we subject ourselves to while trying to connect with other humans. On “In My Belly,” he wonders whether love is just another quantifiable metric that can be life-hacked, and whether it can be intellectualized at all. On “I.K.W.Y.T.,” he examines all the tortuous ways we hold back on our instincts (“Clenching my fist so I don’t cum too quick in my undies/Holding my tongue to ensure I don’t do any speaking”) and by the closing “Have Fun!,”  he’s virtually given up on the idea of healthy and fulfilling monogamous relationships.
It’s no wonder that the most convincing love songs on A Healthy Earth fall outside the realm of reality. One man writes a love song to his car; another body-swaps with his dog so he can write a love song to himself. On “Multiverse,” Katz assumes a humanoid vocal to imagine Mother Earth on a self-care kick. These imaginative flights offer welcome moments of respite, but Katz quickly brings them back down to Earth; the alternate reality he envisions on “Multiverse” is simply one where he never becomes a musician and can afford to buy a new car.
Every song on A Healthy Earth could function as an essay prompt, and like a good issue of The New Yorker or The Baffler, these divergent intellectual exercises are bound by a general thematic and philosophical coherence: If Katz ever decided to go deeper, A Healthy Earth would probably make a great podcast series. That said, it’s still a rock record, one that works within subgenres of indie rock that frequently deny themselves visceral pleasures—slowcore, math-y DC post-punk.
Peaer are now a tour-tested three-piece that have somehow gotten tighter and looser, the way bands do when it’s clear that they enjoy each other’s company. Katz’s guitar figures and vocals take counterintuitive steps towards dissonant note clusters before righting themselves into delightful sing-song melodies, replicating the effect of those bizarre ice creams that have sriracha or mustard in them. Two members of Peaer make their living as recording engineers, and if A Healthy Earth is any indication, they’ve been studying Steve Albini’s every mic placement with monastic intensity. Earth has such an extreme dynamic range that it sounds almost wrong compared to others in its realm. During the times when the album is quiet, it’s as unnerving and tense as anything on the Midsommar soundtrack. When it eventually gets loud—and Peaer rock more convincingly and nastily than just about any band lumped into slowcore—its lean arrangements hit with more unexpected force than any post-rock or metal crescendo. This is the kind of visceral wish fulfillment Peaer specialize in on A Healthy Earth—it acknowledges how much of our lives are spent waiting in line to manage our agony when just giving it a voice might be the only way to get relief.


The goregrind crew’s sixth album, based on a 19th-century Scottish killing spree, is the metal equivalent of a bingeable British TV period piece.

Death Revenge

If you’re going to make music about chopping people up, it follows that you’ll leave a more lasting impression if you anchor your subject matter in real-life events. That’s surely the case with Death Revenge, the sixth full-length from long-running Northern California death metal/goregrind quartet Exhumed, but not necessarily for the reasons you’d expect. Inspired by a series of murders that took place in 19th-century Edinburgh, Death Revenge marks the first time that the band’s frontman and chief lyricist, Matt Harvey, has focused his obsession with mutilated bodies on a narrative that carries the weight of genuine tragedy. It works because Harvey—never one to take himself too seriously—approaches this material with a storyteller’s relish.
Since Exhumed formed almost 30 years ago, violence has been Harvey’s one and only topic of choice. You might expect him to have run out of new things to say on this subject, and it's often felt as though he has, notwithstanding the sociopolitical messages Harvey has talked about burying alongside the blood-spattered limbs that litter his songs. Musically, his approach has stuck closely to the blueprint set out by UK grindcore pioneers Carcass in the ’80s—but like most of that band’s followers, Harvey has had difficulty replicating the satirical wit in Carcass lyricist Jeff Walker’s anatomically graphic wordplay.
This time, he comes fairly close, thanks to a clever decision to present Death Revenge as goregrind’s answer to “Sweeney Todd.” By introducing a colorful cast of characters into the storyline, Harvey turns the gruesome tale behind the album into a delicious thrill ride. Hilariously, the lyric sheet is laid out as an opera program and even includes the credit “libretto by Matt Harvey.” He commits to this presentation even further by opening the album with a classical overture arranged by former Exhumed bassist Matt Widener (best known as the bassist and lyricist in Cretin, a grindcore act that eschews Exhumed’s slasher-film aesthetic for equally shock-driven psychological and body horror). The overture begins with an unmistakable tip of the hat to John Carpenter’s iconic Halloween theme before melodramatic violins take over. If you’ve watched a British-made period TV drama lately, the similarities are obvious. When the band tears in with its usual arsenal of chainsaw riffs, the effect is almost vulgar—guttural savagery intruding on the highbrow.
As always, the influence of Carcass looms large. Every Exhumed album, including this one, contains several moments where you can play a game of “name the Carcass tune this riff is based on.” By this point, though, Harvey and company have become adept at sequencing riffs into more than just a patchwork of references to songs they didn’t write. Death Revenge is a reminder that Exhumed was never meant to function as a tribute act, though they sometimes look like one.
For good measure, Harvey throws in references to Slayer’s “Raining Blood” and “War Ensemble,” showing the formative impact that thrash metal had on him. These slight downshifts provide a change of pace from the relentlessness of the blast beats. After many years of sticking to the same shtick at more or less the same frenzied tempo, Exhumed have arguably gotten more energetic, better at conserving their energy, and more deliberate about how one riff flows into the next. The pacing of Death Revenge is the element that most clearly sets it apart from both death metal convention and the band’s earlier work.
It helps that Harvey gives his mordant sense of humor room to shine for once, despite the grim reality the story is based on. In her 2011 study The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh’s Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes, author Lisa Rosner describes the killings in question as “the most atrocious murder spree of the century, outflanking even Jack the Ripper’s.” These events ultimately led to the U.K. parliament passing the Anatomy Act of 1832—which, of course, gets a playfully somber classical instrumental named after it here.
As the lyrics make clear, the Anatomy Murders were committed in order to supply black-market corpses for medical research. Harvey may or may not be commenting on the way modern market forces make mincemeat of us all when he growls, “Stone walls do not a prison make/Nor six feet of sod a grave/So pray the lord your soul to take/You’ll need defenders of the grave/Hallmarks of this ghoulish age”—but you don’t need to read that far into this album to enjoy it. The murders have appeared in British nursery rhymes, and Harvey often takes a similar tone in talking about them on the new songs. Strangely, Death Revenge doesn’t make for an especially scary or even creepy experience. It’s artfully conceived, lurid fun that sees this band finally wringing some substance out of the same old blood and guts.


On their 17th album, the White brothers discover where their symbiotic psych rock goes when it has more space, more range, and more fidelity.

Sorcerer

With the arrival of Sorcerer, Tonstartssbandht now have seventeen releases. It’s a daunting amount of music even though brothers Andy and Edwin White have been upping entire albums to their Bandcamp page—which phonetically pronounces as “TAHN-starts-bandit”—since 2008 (not counting Andy’s solo projects as Andy Boay and Edwin’s as Eola). While Orlando-born and bred, for the better part of their existence the White boys lived in different cities, resorting to swapping their drum and Danelectro guitar parts back and forth online. It might scan as an awkward way to cherry-pick and organize jams, but their saving grace is the type of secret language and telepathic connection that only the tightest of siblings can have.
After calling Brooklyn home, the brothers are back in Orlando and the type of ramshackle pastiche that they once enacted via email must now cohere in the same room. For the most part, Sorcerer succeeds, moving their sound forward while maintaining their penchant for detours. Tonstartssbandht keeps the lo-fi qualities of their previous albums intact, the hiss of the room and a quivering snare coil audible at the start of “Breathe.” It’s the sound of Guided by Voices swapping out their arena rock fantasies of being in the Who for being a member of Amon Düül’s Munich commune instead.
“Breathe and know you’re forgiven/Screams so peculiar to the living,” one brother whispers like a ’60s sage just back from a particularly messianic acid trip. “Breathe” moves at a deliberate pace, favoring slack drum rolls while Andy lays down guitar lines clear in tone, the two never quite settling into any one meter or stanza length. But about two minutes in, a voice swaddled in effects warns “I won’t keep you safe,” the guitar thickens and a tom roll thunders across the song, signaling lift off. As is their wont, the psychedelic effects are mostly kept to the vocals, allowing Andy’s clean-strummed figures to ring out like a bell and build upwards. The siblings harmonize, the rhythms choogle along, a harmonica drones some ten minutes in and everything turns weightless and dissolves at song’s end.
Rather than enact American psychedelic rock of the ’60s, Tonstartssbandht treats their psychedelic sprawls much like Amon Düül II did circa Yeti. Each number exists less as a means to drive a blues song into your frontal lobes like a trepan and more like a trip through a dark forest. The epic songs meander from darkness to clearing back into bramble, with no clear path being taken, only to stumble suddenly upon a plateau. The lyrics too move from darkness (“Life is long as long as you’re lonely”) to light (“If you don’t believe me, that’s chill”). During a previous era, the brothers might have been stuck with recreating the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix (much like the latter, their father played guitar upside-down), but thanks to decades of reissues of psychedelic music apart from the U.S.-UK axis, be it the twee amoebas of Incredible String Band, German krautrock or Swedish cosmonauts like Träd, Gräs Och Stenar and International Harvester, the boys have a broader and deeper template to draw upon and they pull from all of the above.
The three expansive pieces of Sorcerer resemble trips in how they evolve from moment to moment, but at times it means sacrificing some of the experimental eclecticism of their previous albums, be it the loopy chewed-tape beats of “5FT7,” the thrashy outbursts of “I’m a Welsh Souper,” and songs that evoke the jamborees of early Animal Collective. That said, the foggy coherence of thirteen-minute closer “Opening” careens from high to nebulous high, finding a wobbly groove like Creedence Clearwater Revival early on, then revving into heavy-fuzz near the eight-minute mark. It’s fierce like Blue Cheer could get, but just as quickly as it settles in, the two ease off the gas for a woozy interlude. “I hope you know what you’re doing/I don’t know what to say to you,” they sing in their uncanny, off-kilter harmony, and it’s unclear whether they are singing that to their fans or just amongst themselves. It encapsulates the psychedelic experience in a couplet, offering enlightenment and bafflement both.
Correction: The review originally misstated where the band lives. It has been updated to accurately reflect they currently live in Orlando, Fla.


The third album from the duo of Juliette Pearl Davis and Joachim Polack takes on the soft psychedelic hues of Stereolab and Wendy Carlos, shot through with malaise and a curious sense of overstimulation.

Flowerland

Pearl & the Oysters have always indulged in pleasurable excess. Juliette Pearl Davis (Pearl) and Joachim Polack (The Oysters)—school friends from Paris who left their homeland for Gainesville, Florida in the mid '10s and never looked back—make synth sounds you can sink your teeth into, gooey guitar licks that stick to the roof of your mouth, and vocal harmonies so syrupy they linger on your tastebuds. These qualities were present on their self-titled 2017 debut and even more prevalent on their second album, 2018’s Canned Music. On Flowerland, the whorl of Rhodes keys and sparkling synth tones that herald opener “Soft Science” introduce their complex textures, building on the work of favorites such as Stereolab, Wendy Carlos, and Os Mutantes. Polack lays down a gummy bassline that melts into the meat of the track, as Davis’ persuades guest Kuo-Hung Tseng, of Taipei art-pop quintet Sunset Rollercoaster, to join her at the beach.
Tseng is one of 24 collaborators on Flowerland, who variously sit in on traditional pop instruments, as well as lap steel, electric sitar, tack piano, and the vibraslap. Other than Tseng’s contribution to “Soft Science,” though, the only auxiliary vocals come from Dent May on the hyper-saccharine “Candy”; Davis sings all the other songs alone. This is a good thing: Neither Tseng’s nor May’s vocals are gritty enough to cut through Davis’ sweet soprano melodies, and in the absence of a true foil, her gift is best presented alone.
Davis and Polack recorded Flowerland piecemeal in Gainesville, New York, Paris, and Los Angeles, where they moved just before COVID-19 hit American shores. Settling into a new city as the world shut down put them in a contemplative mood. Even the bubblegum back-and-forth of the title track touches on the alienation they felt upon arrival. The trippy fuzz guitar on “Crocodile” belies feelings of boredom, loneliness, screen addiction, and creative stagnation brought on by prolonged periods spent indoors. And the flirtatious call-and-response of “Soft Science” references Polack’s attempts to juggle coursework as a musicology Ph.D. student with the responsibilities of a working artist. Still, these fleeting references to serious subjects breeze by too quickly to produce any real emotional conflict. The duo communicates through overstimulation, and their frenetic production clouds any dissonance between music and lyrics before you have time to recognize it.
Pearl & the Oysters’ most poignant tracks convey snippets of imagery without context. “The sound of waves come crashing on the shore, Pier 64,” a nostalgic refrain from Canned Music standout “Mermaid Parade,” evokes a visceral tremble. Flowerland’s closest analog is its only certifiable slow burn, “Evening Sun.” Its simple chorus—“Colors are circling around/Turning your head upside down/My feet aren’t touching the ground/On the merry-go-round”—isn’t poetry on its own, but the comparatively spartan arrangement behind Davis’ voice allows it to shine through the mix and transport you.
When misdirected, however, Davis and Polack’s tendency to stimulate every nerve ending at once can backfire. The most puzzling choice on Flowerland is their cover of Caetano Veloso’s “Baby,” one of the greatest love songs of all time—and a subtle critique of imported American capitalism. Referring back to the rawness of the original 1968 Gal Costa version, or Os Mutantes’ mystical redux from the same year, would have offered Davis the opportunity to access a new expressive dimension. Instead, they reprise Os Mutantes’ 1971 rendition of the song—a whimsical, English-language flip—which sanitizes the track of both its beauty and its satire. The result is the same unpleasant sugar rush you get from listening to a loungey Beatles cover, or downing a full gallon of Hawaiian Punch. Luckily, the rest of the album is much more fulfilling. Pearl & the Oysters’ lush, pillowy tracks are lovely to listen to, even when they don’t leave much room for reflection.

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The funk-rock band’s second album of the year is a surprisingly introspective set filled with references to forgotten actors, classic bands, and, most tellingly, decades-old Chili Peppers songs.

Red Hot Chili Peppers: Return of the Dream Canteen

Return of the Dream Canteen

Anthony Kiedis is at the county fair. He’s in your lane. He’s in Baton Rouge, listening to Raw Power. The Red Hot Chili Peppers singer is everywhere at once on Return of the Dream Canteen, but he often sounds like he’d rather be at home, in the quiet, deep in his memories. Like April’s Unlimited Love—and so much of their discography—Dream Canteen is overlong, generous in spirit, inconsistent in execution, and puffed up with fraternal charm. What it lacks is harder to define, though its absence is immediately apparent. Even at their most poignant, the quartet have always sounded like a band drawing inhuman amounts of energy from the world around them. Maybe it’s the three years they spent off the road, maybe it’s the fact that the world doesn’t have much to offer a band so reliant on goofball vapor right now, but for perhaps the first time in their career, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, undefeated in their hearts, sound spooked by life’s long, slow fade.
While the sense of time’s encroachment makes Dream Canteen one of the most theoretically interesting albums in their catalog, it also makes it less compelling than the melancholy highs they brushed on 1999’s Californication and 1995’s underrated One Hot Minute. This is an album that feels like it’s wrapped up in June gloom, even when it’s trying to tell you it’s in a great mood. Those gray L.A. mornings give way to glorious afternoons, but when the fog burns off halfway through the album, Dream Canteen reveals itself as a subdued, surprisingly inward-facing album. It’s as if the fresh start with guitarist John Frusciante, who rejoined the band for a third go-round in 2019, has also prompted a new examination of all the things in life that haven’t been restored. Accordingly, Dream Canteen is populated with forgotten actors, classic bands, and, most tellingly, many lyrical and musical references to decades-old Red Hot Chili Peppers songs. Oftentimes, this most kinetic of bands sounds like they’re sitting down. They sound like they’re wearing shirts.
Whether this works or not is largely dependent on what you expect from the second Red Hot Chili Peppers double album of 2022. Dream Canteen’s 17 songs were recorded in the same sessions as Unlimited Love, and like those tracks, they suffer from the tidiness of Rick Rubin’s production. He keeps the four Peps sealed off from one another at a time when they should sound closer than ever; you could stroll in the space between Frusciante’s guitar and Flea’s bass in “Fake as Fu@k.” Many of the songs on the first half feel like valedictory takes on the band’s earlier styles: See the Mother’s Milk-era “ya-yas” with which Kiedis marks his arrival in “Tippa My Tongue,” a song whose opening drumroll and rolling bassline recall the intro to 2002’s “Can’t Stop.” The latter song pops up again in “Peace and Love,” whose chorus seems to have been written on top of the By the Way single’s.
Kiedis is in “Antoine the Swan” mode throughout the album, revisiting the band’s dormant P-Funk influence implicitly as he sings out of the side of his mouth and explicitly in the “Sir Nose D Voidoffunk” vocal pitch-shifting that opens “Afterlife.” In a cute twist, he tries to convince a love interest not to move to Los Angeles in “Bella,” and in “Tippa My Tongue,” he lays down a smoove melody, singing that he’s here to “pull your hair” in a way that is somehow incredibly sexy, not at all threatening, and a little nostalgic.
While some of these songs can feel regressive or at least undercooked on their own, they’re reframed by the open-hearted sadness that takes over the album’s second half. “My Cigarette” interpolates Lady Gaga’s “Pokerface” chorus over a noir bassline from Flea while Frusciante’s guitar rotates like a ceiling fan slowly turning in a hot room. They flash and flap like Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies in “Carry Me Home,” and Kiedis implores the listener not to “lose sight of this generous plan.” Even when they're trying to celebrate, the Chili Peppers sound exhausted by grief. Dead musicians show up often: Layne Stayley, Kiedis’ godfather Sonny Bono, possibly Bradley Nowell. Eddie Van Halen gets a whole song in his honor, though the seasick loneliness of the solo Frusciante rips through the song’s second half is a better tribute to Funkadelic’s Eddie Hazel.
As always, the lyric sheet has more proper-noun-driven non-sequiturs than the average Family Guy episode (Who can say what the Dodgers pulling off a double play has to do with the rest of “The Drummer”?), but it’s occasionally possible to hear them as Kiedis’ way of getting around saying what he wants to say directly, or as a way of acknowledging that direct language can't capture the exuberance he feels. When it works, it can be strangely touching. Over percolating clouds of synth in “La La La La La La La La,” he promises his lover, “You’ll be Chong and I’ll be Cheech.” It’s a ridiculous lyric in an otherwise tender song, but its placement suggests that this is simply who he is and singing this way to his audience is a kind of intimacy.
Despite a few experiments—Josh Johnson’s halting sax solo in “My Cigarette,” the minimalist house percussion of “In the Snow”—Dream Canteen doesn’t represent a new direction, nor does it find the band taking the kinds of stylistic risks of the earlier Frusciante and Dave Navarro eras. It can feel chalky, its silliness toned down but not turned off; it makes these songs seem a touch distant and distracted. Not all legendary bands get the chance to age, and of all the groups in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, perhaps only their heroes in Van Halen and Parliament-Funkadelic have had to work as hard at carrying their wackiness into old age. While neither of those bands were able to turn their brilliant live shows into a legacy-consolidating late-career album, the Chili Peppers do have the creative and emotional capability to do so. Like Unlimited Love, Return of the Dream Canteen is not that album, but it does show the funky monks keeping the faith in their unquenchable spirit.


A new reissue of the Egyptian guitarist’s 1974 breakthrough showcases his virtuosic playing and groundbreaking blend of styles.

Giant + Guitar

In the early 1970s, Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid left Al Firka Al Masiya, one of the most celebrated orchestras in Egypt, and set off to form his own band. When asked about this decision years later during a TV interview, he replied, “Most composers who wrote for the guitar gave it the maximum they could imagine it could do.” Khorshid, on the other hand, wanted to be free to explore the electric guitar’s full potential.
The Arabic title of his first solo album, then, is a fitting one: Boss Shouf, Omar Byamel Eh!!! —Look and See, What Omar’s Doing!!!. Recorded in Beirut’s Polysound Studios with renowned engineer Nabil Mumtaz and released on the Voice of Lebanon label in 1974, the album is rooted in a deep knowledge of traditional Arabic music while experimenting with electronic instruments. The album was also released with the English title Giant + Guitar and marketed with the name Rhythms From the Orient and cheesy, Arabian Nights-style artwork to satisfy the burgeoning exotica market.
On this new reissue, the Paris-based label We Want Sounds have opted to go with the original (and much cooler) Giant + Guitar artwork, which depicts a striking Khorshid on his motorbike, guitar in hand, riding around Beirut’s famous Hamra street, where he held a residency in a local club. The release is also accompanied by enlightening liner notes from Lebanese DJ and researcher Ernesto Chahoud, and it follows the reissue of 1978’s With Love and Sublime Frequencies’ comprehensive compilation Guitar El Chark.
Khorshid was a well-known figure in Arabic pop music before striking out on his own. He built a reputation as a talented guitarist playing Beatles and Shadows covers with popular rock band Les Petit Chats in the mid-1960s. After catching the attention of composer, musician, and conductor Ahmed Fouad Hassan, Khorshid began playing in orchestras and backing pop stars like Oum Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez. The introduction of the electric guitar to such traditional outfits was timid at first, but the pioneering Egyptian composer Baligh Hamdi, who worked with Hafez, pushed to explore the possibilities of modern Arabic music by incorporating electronic violins, keyboards, and guitars in harmony with Egyptian folk melodies and rhythms. The move divided critics but was a popular success, and Khorshid’s guitar became increasingly central to the orchestra’s sound.
Giant + Guitar marked the beginning of a period of freedom and experimentation for Khorshid. It was the first of a series of groundbreaking albums that showcased his talent for fusing the style of Arabic oud players with electronic instrumentation and innovative arrangements. The album was released shortly after Khorshid moved from Cairo to the more vibrant and culturally progressive Beirut in 1973.
Even in these early recordings, Khorshid was already daring and self-assured. On his own composition, “Taqasim Sanat Alfein,” he plays scales on electric guitar, embellished with touches of understated synths, building an atmospheric solo that picks up speed and shows off his characteristic fast-picking technique. Elsewhere he interprets the work of other composers, such as Lebanese musician Nour Al Mallah’s “Rakset El Fadaa,” which opens the album with a long intro before giving way to a clamor of percussion and sinewy organ.
Elsewhere, Khorshid takes on hits like “Leilet Hob,” originally sung by national icon Oum Kalthoum, and gives them a psychedelic makeover. The sound is bold but not overwhelming, and by alternating between intricate guitar solos and delicate synth with faster, fuzzed-up arrangements, Giant + Guitar not only showcases the range of Korshid’s talents and influences but also makes for a cohesive listen from beginning to end.
A testament to his exquisite talent, the album is also a document to a time of cultural exchange and artistic openness. As a young guitarist in Cairo, Khorshid grew up immersed in traditional music, but he also absorbed the raucous guitar of the Shadows, the psychedelic experiments of the Beatles, and Baligh Hamdi’s subversive approach to composition. Giant + Guitar was his first attempt at carving out his own identity: The record’s constantly shifting arrangements would define his sound and leave an indelible mark on the future of Arabic music.

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John Maclean has long been DFA's secret weapon. The Rapture gives good face. James Murphy gives good copy. Delia ...

Less Than Human

John Maclean has long been DFA's secret weapon. The Rapture gives good face. James Murphy gives good copy. Delia and Gavin give good "oh, they're easily my favorite" hipster trump card. But Maclean is the most effective. If any DFA records come close to hands-aloft status, it's his "Give Me Every Little Thing" and "You Can't Have It Both Ways". They're, you know, house music. No need for any prefixes or suffixes.
Maclean's former band, Six Finger Satellite, were a bruising mixture of skinny tie and thick neck, mixed eye-meltingly loud by Murphy live, and all but blueprinting Les Savy Fav (who I like better, but why lie?) on record. Which might explain why his dance music is so muscular (have you listened to those early Rapture EP's lately?), but it does make Less Than Human, a good chunk of which could be described as "gentle" or at least "pretty", a bit surprising. It's not quite the masterpiece everyone (at least me) was hoping for (the exclusion of "You Can't Have It Both Ways", for example, should be punishable Midnight Express-style) but it does deliver on the hype, which in 2005 is almost the same thing.
"Shining Skinned Friend" is filled to bursting over its bacon fat drums: theremin noise, vocodered sprites, ghostly coos, vocal synths, italo ripples, "dark" Euro vocals. This is his happening and it freaks me out. "Give Me Every Little Thing" is pure bliss, from the interstellar electrical storm opening to the whammy bar keytar solo that closes it out. In between, you've got a giant's handclaps, a groaning slap bass, barbiturate P-Funk chanting, and call-and-response synth squiggles. "Tito's Way" is one of the few nu-disco tracks that recognizes the power of the Party Whistle. (No "whoop whoop" though.) It also has breaking bells, steady-rocking drums, farty robot bass, and sassy-yet-dead-eyed femme vocals.
The rest of the record is surprisingly melancholy. "Love Is in the Air" is Metro Area after a crying jag. "In The Afternoon" is background music for a breakup scene in a WB teen drama starring Ralf und Florian. "My Time Is Running Out" opens with Arcadian, cascading synth-strings and trills of bleeps like all-white Christmas lights blinking on and off. It could be the intro to a Kylie Minogue record before it rolls out another gently bumping, mid-tempo groove. (Actually, re-reading that, I'm not sure if it isn't a Kylie Minogue record.) Closer "Dance With Me" lopes for 12 minutes towards a climax that never comes, a busted robot shooting little sparks of piano as it limps towards Nancy Whang's siren song.
The title track of Less Than Human (which appears nowhere on the album) was first released on the 2004 DFA Compilation #2. But come on: Even allowing for coincidence, is it possible to hear it without this year's Daft Punk album looming like an unanswered question? Alongside Vitalic-- Maclean's closest contemporary, especially when you factor in the penchant for queasy synth miniatures like opener "AD2003"-- Maclean the student is now doing the "robot rock" thing better than the masters. And he only rocks about half the time. But then again Daft Punk once made their rep singing about unrequited love, rather than just breaking hearts.


Interiors, Cameron Mesirow's second album as Glasser, is a methodical, computer-tethered expedition into the vast, wild expanse of human feeling. The homespun warmth and tribal rhythms of 2010's Ring have given way to chilly digital perfection.

Interiors

Manhattan's architecture results from the most rational possible pursuit of the irrational. That's one main argument of Delirious New York, a 1978 book by Dutch theorist Rem Koolhaas that Cameron Mesirow has named as an inspiration for her second album as Glasser. It's also a useful frame for understanding the record, not only its specific lyrical concerns but also its general spirit. Interiors is a methodical, computer-tethered expedition into the vast, wild expanse of human feeling.
Glasser's 2010 debut Ring underpinned Mesirow's soaring vocals with free-flowing, rhythm-obsessed eclecticism that made for a notably welcoming collection of atmospheric, electronics-brushed pop. That description still largely applies to Interiors, but the homespun warmth and tribal rhythms of its predecessor have given way to chilly digital perfection—though plenty of organic elements persist, in a way that's crucial—and the album as a whole is more thematically unified. Mesirow's voice, both a singer and a songwriter, still towers over the proceedings, and you can look to this to orient you anytime the sonic and conceptual edifice grows too dizzying.
Mesirow moved from Los Angeles to downtown Manhattan between albums, and the city she finds here is an Ableton Live-era update on sleek 20th-century modernism: Brancusi's "Bird in Space", in CGI space. Her Swedish co-producer Van Rivers, who also helped on Ring, applies his background in dark, shuffling techno and production credits from such albums as the Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson's self-titled 2009 solo album as Fever Ray. The nod toward heady electronic music is nothing entirely new from Glasser, who has been remixed by the likes of Jamie xx and Lindstrøm, but she credits her collaborator for helping carry out her blueprints. "I was like the designer, and he was the architect," Mesirow told Billboard.
Glasser's first widely circulated song, 2009's "Apply", meditated on the permeability of walls and windows, and Interiors' rooms, too, are rarely as hermetically sealed as a cursory listen might suggest. "Shape", the opening track and first advance track, introduces the LP's silvery, aerodynamicism with whooshing bass and crisp kick drums, but Mesirow's layered, melismatic vocals are front and center—and she's describing not a city skyline, but an ocean beach. While "Exposure" glitchily theorizes on the "modern trouble" of urban living, Mesirow is far more likely to use her fabricated sonic setting as a framework for exploring personal demons: The bird calls and tropical tinges on "Dissect" signal a lingering stylistic connection to labelmates Tanlines, but next to lyrics about being "shackled to a window/ Anything but open," they also point to her much-reported struggles with spacial anxiety.
The interiors Glasser explores most compellingly are, it won't surprise you at this point to learn, the ones within human beings. She applies the same ruthless precision to these ostensibly messier subjects, so that video selection "Design", an examination of physical desire that wields human breaths as percussion, is crystalline enough for a posh gallery. But the insides of people turn out to be at least as unknowable as those of buildings: "Keam Theme", an uptempo standout, opens with a dream sequence and carries on from its oblique title to ask, "How long before I know you?" It might just be me, but something about the hook brings to mind Arthur Russell expressing a similarly surreal, slightly different sentiment decades ago: "That's us, before we got there."
This is ultimately where Glasser manages to communicate the unknowable—in the way her meticulously arranged soundscapes convey a sense of place even when their literal meaning might be just out of grasp. "I'm in your landscape, and I don't wanna go back to mine," Mesirow intones between rippling synths, sinuous orchestration, and percussive crunches on "Landscape", a song that closes with an out-of-nowhere, live-sounding drum-and-keys groove reminiscent of Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder brain trust. It's a track that contains so many of Interiors' paradoxes: the push and pull between 1's and 0's and flesh and blood, between indoors and outdoors ("There's nothing here but walls, walls, walls"), and between two lovers.
Mesirow has also cited Beyoncé as an inspiration, but although a few of the lither moments bring to mind the future-soul of Little Dragon, her closest parallels on Interiors remain big-idea, big-voice art-poppers such as Bat for Lashes or Björk. Indeed, if the album errs in a particular direction, it's in leaning a bit too heavily on abstraction without anything that lowers its barriers quite as far as, say, "Laura", from Bat for Lashes' 2012 The Haunted Man. A three-part "Windows" suite, presented out of order, brings in fractured sax bleats and ambient textures, but it's more difficult to unlock than its title might hint, and overworked lyrics like "listlessness becomes a habit" occur a little too often throughout the album. Koolhaas, author of Delirious New York, later decided it was time to "kill the skyscraper." Glasser has built a dazzling one, but you figure she just might know the feeling.


With a lavish new album, the Colombian American singer serves up lush ballads about protecting your peace and sizzling reggaeton to disturb it.

Orquídeas

In the video for “Te Mata,” a highlight from her resplendent new album Orquídeas, Kali Uchis embodies the ritual cruelties and delights of life as a femme fatale. The visual is grainy and textured, unmistakably Almodóvarian with its vivid, saturated color palette, high drama, and vintage glam. She vamps in an ivory, crystal-encrusted mermaid gown. She throws a cordless phone handset through a window. She shoves glass bottles off a table in a fit of rage. She cries a single tear in a baby-blue robe and matching lace bra, her eyes framed by immaculately feathered lashes. She chuckles when an anonymous hand presses a revolver to her forehead.
“Te Mata” is a supreme example of Uchis’ gift for crafting universes of revenge, infatuation, and sorrow. As she’s released more Spanish-language music in recent years, including her 2020 LP Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞, Uchis has sharpened that vision, securing chart hits along the way. On Orquídeas, she writes another instruction manual for baddie behavior, where women are encouraged to stuff toxic exes into the trunks of their cars and loaf the day away in red-glitter bustiers and platform heels. But the album is also a reflection of the capaciousness of diasporic music. Despite the overwhelming commercial success of bilingual artists of Latin American descent, our corporate music industry overlords still find it impossible to believe a major label singer might thrive making original music in both Spanish and English. Like Selena Quintanilla before her, Uchis proves them wrong.
Much of Orquídeas reprises the shimmering daydreams Uchis is known for, luxuriating in background harmonies and synth arpeggios that feel like they’re enveloped in charmeuse fabrics. “Young, Rich & in Love,” “Diosa,” and “Perdiste” were designed to play in the background while you bathe in a clawfoot tub full of milk and rose petals. “Heladito” is a lovely return to form; longtime fans will recognize the doo-wop melodic sensibility and pure longing of Uchis’ 2015 Por Vida EP—though she nods to a new era, singing, “No soy pop star pero si soy internacional.”
The first third of the record is so uniformly luxurious that the songs are almost hard to distinguish. But the synth-pop glitter bomb “Igual Que Un Ángel” is a beaming exception, its cherubic hook a sure shot for TikTok virality. Over a funky bassline and prismatic chimes, Uchis and the mulleted corrido prince Peso Pluma sing about a woman who never falls prey to superficial love. Pluma’s nasal vocal tones layer effortlessly over the groove, unlocking a new superpower. Uchis’ vocal performance across the record represents a leap forward too: 12 years ago, she possessed the more limited—but still soulful—range of a lounge singer; now she stretches her voice to a fluttering whistle register on “¿Cómo Así?”
When she dives into Latin American idioms, Uchis is unstoppable; Latina mode is absolutely on. For “Te Mata,” the Colombian American returns to bolero after first exploring the style via her La Lupe and Los Zafiros covers from Sin Miedo. Women bolero singers have been entrenched in cultural memory as hysterical, abject divas, but with “Te Mata,” Uchis joins a growing wave of young artists reinterpreting the form as an expression of power. Over a gentle Spanish guitar and jagged string arrangements, Uchis sings of being cast as the “diabla” in a selfish lover’s story, only to realize she’s much better off without him (the kicker: he finds her newfound autonomy so painful it might kill him). Though she’s not as much of a vocal powerhouse as La Lupe, Uchis’ smoldering performance is still gorgeous, channeling the wounded desperation and hard-earned freedom of the women who came before her.
After sad-girl hour, though, it’s time for Uchis to scorch the earth in an old-school reggaeton blaze. Built on an updated instrumental of Andy Boy and DJ Blass’ “Dem Bow,” “Muñekita” recruits El Alfa and City Girls’ JT for three and a half minutes of knee-injuring perreo magic, fueled by Kali’s feline purrs, El Alfa’s twittering breakdown, and JT’s staggering levels of shade. It’s got a delicious collection of one-liners; I highly recommend adding “sana, sana, colita de rana, bitch” to your arsenal of slander. “Labios Mordidos,” which features fellow paisa Karol G, is a sapphic ode to a dancefloor diosa who’s as sweet as arepas de choclo; its kicks are harsh, its moans are orgasmic, and its lyrics are devilishly coy.
The ventures into new genres are thrilling, too. “No Hay Ley Parte 2,” a refresh of the 2022 single, adds a smutty dembow riddim to the original ’90s house production, courtesy of superstars Tainy, El Guincho, Jam City, Ovy on the Drums, and Geeneus. The new rendition also includes a verse of come-ons from Puerto Rican playboy Rauw Alejandro. His dirty talk is a fitting accompaniment to Uchis’ breezy hook; along with the added reggaeton percussion, it elevates “No Hay Ley” to a blissful crest.
On closer “Dame Beso // Muévete,” Uchis indulges in ’90s merengue. True to form, she puts her own pleasure at the thematic center of the song, and you can practically picture a frosty Presidente in your hand, the sweat dripping down your back as Los Toros Band and Toño Rosario hits blast from a speaker. Halfway through, the band picks up the pace into a full-on perico ripiao; it’s an unexpected party trick and exuberant send-off engineered for Saturday-morning cleaning efficiency.
Uchis has built her entire repertoire on stories of seduction and anguish, fantasies where women and femmes can be as bad as they are tender. On “Me Pongo Loca,” she spells out this naked truth: “Digo que a mí me vale cero/Pero tampoco soy hecha de hielo” (“I say that I don’t care at all/But I’m not made of ice either”). On Orquídeas, the Kali Uchis Doctrine of Reina Ideology—in which drop-dead goddesses never need to text back—is more potent than ever. Most importantly, the sound of Orquídeas represents the fluidity of being a diaspora kid—even if the suits will never get it.


On his eighth album, Usher sounds better than he's sounded in ages, proving he will not go gentle into that quiet stormy night.

Hard II Love

Like many child stars, Usher has struggled with his transition to adulthood. He was too old to be lurking like somebody’s creepy uncle in the 2010 video for “Lil Freak,” and too young to be belting like a 55-year-old who’s just bagged his first under-30 girlfriend in the song “Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home).” But on 2014’s “Good Kisser,” a louche wink of a song, he figured out how to relax into exactly what he was: a dude in his mid-thirties with the abs of Michelangelo’s David, the dance moves of MJ, and the money of an artist who released the sixth best-selling album of the 2000s. He sounded breezy and at ease, finally confident enough to date women his age. So it’s a little disappointing that on Hard II Love, Usher’s eighth studio album, he hasn’t managed to hang onto that effortlessness. But there’s plenty to like, starting with his voice, which sounds better than ever.
It helps that he’s back to doing R&B. Over the years, Usher has toyed with electronic music which never played to his strengths. Songs like the fist-pumping cash grab “OMG” are made for singers who rely on over-processing to plump up their vocals. Usher has a warm, rich, creamy voice that needs room to spread. Experts in dealing with exceptional voices like The-Dream and Tricky Stewart (“Bump,” one of many bangers on Hard II Love) and Paul Epworth (the glittery, star-flecked album opener “Need U”) clear out space for Usher to just be Usher. Especially on the first half of the album, the production is as sumptuous and smooth as Frette linens. Even relative newcomer Metro Boomin’s “Make U a Believer,” one of the record’s standout tracks, is at home among the veterans. The whole affair sounds so rich that the rootsy Raphael Saadiq-produced closer “Champions” is as out of place as a poor country cousin.
As “OMG” illustrates, Usher is willing to do anything in order not to two-step gently into that gospel-by-day, grown-n-sexy-R&B-booze-cruise-by-night stage of his career, even though “Tell Me,” an eight-and-a-half-minute quiet storm track is just begging for a raging fire and bearskin rug. Hard II Love will keep him safe for now. For the most part, it’s sleek and modern, and it snaps right into the current R&B landscape. The one thing that rankles is that he jacks artists on the rise to do so. From the vocal phrasings to the lyrics, “No Limit” is such a Ty Dolla $ign song that I checked to see if Ty had written it. Of course, younger artists are influenced by more established artists. But when the situation is flipped, few people outside the music industry will know Usher is borrowing from Ty or Jeremih. Let them gain more mainstream recognition before helping yourself to their styles.
Then again, Usher is always trying on new personas, and on Hard II Love, he tests out thug-lover Usher. And frankly, hearing him sing, “Tell me what nigga is perfect? Tell me what nigga is right? Tell me what nigga been with the same bitch and she been holdin’ it down for life?” on “FWM” (“Fuck With Me”) is like Ja Rule trying to sing a Luther Vandross song.
Transitioning from “Need U (Conversation With Priyanka Chopra)” to “Missin U,” Chopra and Usher talk about what they want in a partner. Usher answers that he wants a beautiful woman with a “nice thin waist, fat ass.” Chopra, on the other hand, asks for a man who makes her laugh and feel safe: “He’s gotta be effortless, you know?” On Hard II Love, Usher isn’t that, but trying too hard hasn’t sounded this good in years.


The second album from Michael Milosh and his soft-rock musicians deftly creates an atmosphere that builds out their sound without adding much underneath.

Blood

A few things have changed in the five years since Rhye laid a rose and a lace blindfold on pop music’s pillow. Producer Robin Hannibal quietly left the duo sometime around the release of their debut album, Woman. Under remaining member Michael Milosh’s command, the project has evolved from a studio confection into a real band, its members’ resumes bulleted with former employers like Kelis, Jhené Aiko, and David Byrne. Milosh also broke up with his wife, to whom Woman’s raptures and ecstasies were dedicated. He has a new love now, and she appears on the cover of Blood, rendered once again in artful black and white, even more naked than the woman on the cover of Woman.
Musically, though, Rhye remains very much the same, and Blood picks up where Woman left off: the tempos slow, the decibels soft, the heft negligible. Funk guitars twist like orchids’ tendrils. Disco basslines rarely rise above a muted thump. Textures—a close-miked hi-hat, the rustling hammers of a Rhodes keyboard—are as vivid as fingernails scraping raw silk. The mood is set with grace and ease.
The band’s reference points also remain the same paragons of soft, smooth, and sensuous as before: Talk Talk, for the attention they lavish on the minutiae of empty space, Al Green for his devotion and his sighs, and Sade, for, well, everything. It’s not just that Milosh’s voice often sounds uncannily like Helen Adu’s, it’s that Rhye’s whole bedroom R&B vibe draws heavily upon the sound of Sade albums like Stronger Than Pride and Love Deluxe, with crisp, rock-steady drumming perforating velvety blue keyboards and wordless coos. (Milosh has claimed that he’s “not a big Sade fan,” which, I mean, sure.) If Woman sometimes felt like a pastiche of Sade, Blood feels like a pastiche of Woman. Every detail is accentuated, every gesture exaggerated. Layered handclaps crackle like logs in the fire. Slinky riffs move across electric piano, guitar, clarinet, viola, and French horn. And Milosh’s voice is more delicate and more expressive than ever; it often sounds like he’s trying to locate the precise point along his vocal cords where a syllable vaporizes into a sigh. His concerns may be carnal, but he is forever on the edge of disappearing into a cloud of breath.
Rhye’s soft-pop revivalism is not quite as radical as it once felt. But Blood’s hi-def panorama of feathers and pearls is even more finely detailed than on Woman, and it helps that the band switches up its footsteps frequently without ever breaking the mood. The opening three songs go from languid slow dance to waist-winding funk to a sleek disco skip—though their unvarying palette and Milosh’s insistent whisper also mean that they tend to blend together. “Sinful,” the album’s dramatic closer, borrows from John Williams’ soundtracks and Ali Farka Touré’s desert blues; “Phoenix,” a late-album highlight, exemplifies everything thrilling about the band’s touch. The action on the Rhodes is so tactile it gives goosebumps; overdriven blues guitar riffs twitch and curl like a bitten lip. And Milosh packs real oomph into his vocalizations, even when you can’t quite figure out what he’s singing. If you could bottle the way he mutters “Oh my God,” you could make a mint. It is the sound of sex distilled.
If only he’d left it at those three words, because the more attention you pay to the lyrics, the less enjoyable the album becomes. Milosh fixates upon words with a long “a” sound: waste, waiting, space, changes, cave, awake, face, away, babe, taste, waist, painful, unstable, place, race, face, fable, chase, play, change—the assonant rhymes pile up at the ends of his lines like heaps of scarlet letters. That’s fine; they lend Blood a sort of ruby-colored uniformity. It’s an approach that treats writing as a kind of tone painting. But his sweet nothings (“I kinda love your vain”) are often truly insubstantial.
His single-minded devotion to lewd double entendres can leave a sour taste, too. “Surrender to your needs” turns into “Surrender to your knees,” while in “Taste” he flips the scenario, “licking wounds” while his lover sleeps. And the “rising” that happens in “Phoenix” is almost certainly not a bird. Which is fine; sexy music can be fun! But when all this heavy breathing isn’t flat-out corny, there’s a creepy undercurrent running underneath, a menacing sluice of blood and tears that makes sex and romance sound not very fun at all. It’s a shame, because Blood is a marvel of engineering, of both sounds and moods. With nearly 500 shows under their belt at this point, Rhye have evolved into a formidable machine, but this album often sounds like a studio-crafted simulacrum of a full-band performance, every element a bit too polished. Like a retouched photo, it scans as just a little too perfect—a formalist exercise made primarily just to show that it can be done. Emotionally, it is stunted, a vision of desire as shallow as its cover.


Into It. Over It’s Evan Weiss has a rock band for every occasion. When he’s looking to goof around, he turns to Pet Symmetry, and here they’ve made a record that feels like a sweet spot.

Vision

Evan Weiss sure knows how to compartmentalize. Last we heard from the multitasking Into It. Over It. songwriter, he was pouring out his heart on Standards, one of the more sophisticated albums to emerge from the emo revival, but Weiss has a band for every occasion. In his side project with Mike Kinsella, Their/They’re/There, he indulges his inner math-rock geek, paying homage to some of the more niche corners of Polyvinyl’s discography—much as his old project Stay Ahead of the Weather reveled in the sugary emo of groups like the Get Up Kids. His defining records have been passion projects crafted for people who love these genres as much as he does, but when he’s just looking to goof around, he turns to Pet Symmetry, his trio with a couple of Chicago pop-punk vets, Dowsing’s Erik Czaja and What Gives’ Marcus Nuccio.
Until now the group has mostly defined themselves by their love of puns. Their 2015 full-length Pets Hounds tossed them off at a clip seldom witnessed since Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!! phase, and in concert the band dials up the silliness even further, taking the stage in matching varsity jackets or Hawaiian shirts. In a certain light, there’s something radical about that irreverence, especially given the more serious tendencies of emo’s fourth wave. Acts like the Hotelier and the Wonder Years have raised the stakes with each record, documenting grief and depression in discomforting detail. Sorority Noise and Modern Baseball’s recent releases have doubled, sometimes literally, as suicide prevention hotline advertisements, giving emo a renewed sense of purpose. Meanwhile, Pet Symmetry have taken the opposite track, pulling back the curtain on one of emo’s great secrets: Behind all the sobering prose and artful conviction, there’s usually a bunch of guys who love sports and find it hilarious every time their drummer farts up their tour van.
On their sophomore album Vision, Pet Symmetry look to emo’s more carefree corners, particularly the pop-centric emo of bands like the Promise Ring and the Smoking Popes. Vision delivers on that promise of a good time. “St. John” sets its frothy mall-punk riff to a pogoing bassline, while Weiss breaks out a surprisingly convincing Frank Black impression on the manic, alterna-punk throwback “Eyesores,” one of several tracks that slide in under the two-minute mark. It’s all so brisk and agreeable that it takes a few spins to notice the band’s recalibration: They’ve dialed back the indiscriminate humor of Pets Hounds, bringing their songwriting closer in line with Weiss’ heartfelt Into It. Over It. output.
Punkier tracks like “Hall Monitor” and “Stare Collection” are fun without being overtly funny—no puns here—while a handful of weightier, dialed-down numbers suggest Weiss has begun treating the band as something more significant than a side project. “You & Me & Mt. Hood” even has the autobiographical setup of so many songs on Standards, detailing a lazy vacation day spent traversing a river, beers in hand, in the company of a friend. Unlike most tracks from that album, though, this one has a happy ending: The trip lifts his sunken spirits. “I can’t complain,” Weiss sings, “I’ve got a never-ending week, a couple loose plans and a peck on the cheek.”
The relatively low stakes flatter him. If there was one thing that held back Standards from being the masterpiece it clearly wanted to be, it was its overbearing need to be respected. From its first track, that record telegraphed its hopes of soundtracking the anxieties of an entire age group, but Vision is never so foolhardy in its ambitions—with their jocular image, Pet Symmetry would have you believe they don’t even have ambitions. They’re underselling themselves: Here they’ve made an album that’s lovable without needing to be loved, and insightful without feeling self-important. There are any number of directions Weiss and his bandmates could take a project as easy-going as this one, but Vision feels like a sweet spot.


The UK drill artist's debut album offers a richly drawn portrait of a young man feeling his way through life.

EDNA (Deluxe)

Last October, Headie One claimed a slice of history when his debut album Edna went to number one on the UK chart. He celebrated his achievement at his mother’s graveside, where he rested his award from the Official Charts Company on her black marble headstone and took a picture. He named the album after her—Edna Duah, the epitaph reads—and her image runs throughout. On opener “Teach Me,” he asks her to teach him forgiveness, while “Psalm 35” finds him gazing up at his mother, her presence a steady guide. But this isn’t a project focused solely on grief or mourning. Edna instead provides an anchor point in this richly drawn portrait of a young man feeling his way through life.
Headie’s appeal stems as much from the unflinching realism in his lyrics as it does his wry-smiling, understated demeanor. He blends street-beef references with lingering memories of the UK’s state school curriculum, all carried off without so much as a wink. “My young boy got the stick like Moses with the Israelites,” he offers as an intro on slinky Afrofunk number “Princess Cuts.” He’s witty, too, and not afraid to poke fun at himself: He started out rapping as Headz, after being told his bonce looks like a 50-pence piece.
This charisma helped him parlay features from two of the biggest rappers in the world—Future paints by numbers on “Hear No Evil,” and Drake slips awkwardly off the beat on “Only You Freestyle”—as well as a who’s who of the UK’s sparkling domestic rap scene, with AJ Tracey, Stormzy, Young Adz, Ivorian Doll, Skepta, and Aitch all appearing. Kaash Paige’s vocal acrobatics on “Cold” prove a fitting foil for Headie’s stretched monotone. But for the most part, Headie sounds best on his own. On “Mainstream” he encapsulates the dichotomies of leaving the streets for fame with crisp succinctness: Lines like “Mainstream rapper, autographs on the wing/Mainstream rapper, but my arse full of cling” distill in a handful of syllables what others have wrestled with over years and entire albums.
Headie’s frank and unfettered approach—much like his so-laidback-he’s-almost-comatose flow—allows his taut lyricism to spring forth. His verses on “Breathing”—calmly delivered, full of unfiltered reflection and frank self-assessment—offer the sort of insights that political focus groups could only dream of conjuring. However, he’s quick to move beyond limiting narratives of what drill music represents. The immediately familiar Lady Saw and Red Hot Chili Pepper samples on lead single “Ain’t It Different” embed the track in a mainstream pop context, along with Headie’s recollections of whipping crack, faking urine samples, and baking cakes from Digestive biscuits in prison. References to Harry Potter, Game Of Thrones, and Premier League soccer (one of Headie’s favorite subjects; a budding career of his own was cut short by an ankle injury) give a relatable frame to his otherwise shocking personal stories. It dismantles the idea that the struggles Headie has endured took place in an alternate reality.
The original version of Edna packed 20 tracks and often felt bloated—the clumsy, syllable-cramming “21 Gun Salute” could go, for a start. This deluxe edition adds another eight. “Hung Jury” proves a highlight—lines like “Have you ever felt guilty for being free?” lavish in melancholy—but otherwise, the expanded edition does more to prove the original should have been shorter. Ultimately, this is a shame. But whether you blame the bloat on streaming or impatience on Headie’s part, there’s plenty here to make a mama proud.

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On his austere fourth full-length, the Berlin-based electronic artist Steven Warwick uses ambient synth sketches to convey feelings of precarity and millennial abjection.

Nadir

“Why so sad?/Don’t feel so bad/Get out of bed,” Steven Warwick tunelessly sings over gutted synths and a plodding drum machine on “Get It Together,” the bleak ode to something resembling self-care that introduces Nadir. This half-hearted plea offers quite the starting point: climbing, out of absolute necessity and with little fanfare, from a very low place. The UK-born, Berlin-based Warwick has performed with Luke Younger (aka Helm) in the duo Birds of Delay and, more recently, solo as Heatsick; his output under that moniker offered wry, danceable commentary on the niche social realities of the creative class. This mixtape-like offering is his fourth full-length with PAN, but his first under his own name, and marks a shift away from sardonic needling into something that’s more acutely—and personally—an artifact of total precarity. Balancing a fatigued observational poetics with ambient synth sketches, Nadir strings together a series of uncomfortably crisp images of a parched present.
As Heatsick, Warwick composed and performed using a beat-up Casio keyboard and a drum machine. While his productions weren’t exactly rich in sound, they tended to reach beyond those limited means, deploying skittering rhythms and juxtaposing textures to complex effect. Here, he gives up on this resourceful streak and embraces austerity. Sounds are bluntly placed, without much in the way of effects to dull their sharp corners: A harsh synth patch on “CTFO” maintains a single, flat volume throughout, running head-on into Warwick’s passive baritone. “Low Ceiling” matches a grating beat with the sound of helicopters overhead: “I feel scared/So I took a pill/And it calms me down,” he narrates. More ambient-minded offerings like “Racetrack Playa” and “Canyon Shadow” rumble aimlessly, streaked with staticky, trembling synthesizers. These still stretches are among the most evocative moments on the release, like the wordless reprieve of looking out a window while you’re in transit.
This threadbare aesthetic is propelled by Warwick’s writing. His accounts of panic attacks or souring relationships are indistinctly one-size-fits-most, if occasionally a little repugnant in their sheer passivity. But his descriptions of place are particularly lucid, as on “The Mezzanine,” in which he looks into a new urban shopping plaza: “There’s a zone of near serenity,” he says. “Sometimes you catch the gaze of a passing onlooker. You scan the purchases of an innocent bystander. The mezzanine is your dance floor. It’s your chessboard.”
A visual component to the album exists on Dutch artist Harm van den Dorpel’s delinear.info platform, comprising a nonlinear sequence of lyrics, cellphone videos, and photographs taken by Warwick between Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York, the three locations where Nadir was recorded. This colors in the transient spatial logic and general sense of dislocation that permeate these songs: an image of a desert sunset or a touching abstract photo of a beach at low tide will be layered with an iPhone picture taken in a shopping center or a German fast-food restaurant.
Though it can be beautiful in a stark, sad way, there is little comforting in Nadir’s millennial abjection. Many of the most effective recent attempts to process our troubled socio-political moment in sound have presented some form of escape, or at least catharsis. But these compositions contain neither, and don’t attempt to synthesize a broader narrative. They function instead—like the images Warwick has assembled to accompany them—as snapshot-documents of impermanent locations, of experiences that don’t quite add up, of the bizarre conditions of urban life in 2016. The uneven emotional and social landscapes Warwick conjures feel honest, and woefully relatable, in their inability to resolve.


The Earl Sweatshirt collaborator’s curated, understated mixtape fits a wealth of words into a small space. Even when rapping, he thinks like a producer, as concerned with texture as he is with text.

Try Again

The artist known as ovrkast. emerged seemingly out of nowhere last year with a producer credit on Earl Sweatshirt’s FEET OF CLAY. The Oakland-based producer’s sole contribution to the project, “EL TORO COMBO MEAL,” is a static-heavy slice of chopped-up sampledelia: rumbling drums, a scattered piano line, and cooing, soulful voices. Ovrkast. would probably be familiar only if you’d spent a lot of time digging on Bandcamp, as I’m sure Earl Sweatshirt has. He’s been posting beats there since at least 2016—jazzy and Nujabes-like in their sound, scavenged a capellas woven in and out, with track titles like “.08lamplites[recipe]” and “shouldaz[dust]” that recall of lo-fi beat mastermind Knxwldge’s method of stylizing song names. He’s kept a humble profile in the months since his professional debut, but ovrkast. makes his official introduction with the mixtape Try Again.
Ovrkast. came onto the radar as a producer, but here he also expresses himself lyrically—he began writing bars even before he started making beats, according to a recent Twitter Q&A. His production has an ever-so-light jazz texture, and his rapping does too: not flashy, but bouncy and dense, with a slight monotone edge that demands extra attention to take stock of what he’s saying. There’s a track entitled “2 Minute Bars,” and hardly a song stretches beyond that length. Ovrkast.’s compositions are breakfast nooks, not big rooms—he fits a wealth of words into a small space without making it feel like too many words, not the easiest balance for any backpack-friendly rapper to strike. He doesn’t sound unconfident, but there is an almost intentional shyness to his delivery, a quiet moodiness or restraint, and his voice often comes at us through the sound of tape crackle. There’s a consistent tone across the album’s nine beats, and ovrkast. carefully curates his guest features too, surrounding himself with acclaimed and esoteric lyricists like Mavi and Pink Siifu.
Try Again shows us an artist’s struggle to show himself—as his moniker suggests, ovrkast.’s persona remains cloudy and obscured. His identity-related dilemmas are most explicit on “Face,” featuring the Earl Sweatshirt-affiliated Navy Blue (aka professional skater Sage Elsesser), where his anguish forms the song’s chorus: “Everywhere, like I don’t know my place/I got people waitin’ on me/Still though, I can’t show my face.” At times, like on the tape’s title track, the mood approaches upbeat, but confidence and anxiety are two sides of the same coin—the drums soften and slow, and the song’s central call to “do it all over, try again” mutates from an affirmational mantra into a self-critical monologue, ovrkast. overwhelmed at the blank pages in front of him and the words waiting to be written.
On “Interlude,” ovrkast. lets an audio clip of painter Kerry James Marshall talking about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man outline the thesis of his tape. Marshall reflects on Ellison’s notion of the “simultaneity” of African American life, a kind of dually felt “presence and absence,” which inspired Marshall’s play with different values of black in his own work. Presence and absence offers a useful paradigm for approaching ovrkast.—we see inside his mind, but he still finds a way to keep his distance. Like Kerry James Marshall, ovrkast. is working with color temperature, crafting his sounds in grayscale. He writes bars that require unpacking, but even when rapping, ovrkast. thinks like a producer, as concerned with texture as he is with text. The shades he works in are primarily charcoal and silver, but the spectrum of cool feelings is rich.


The soundtrack to the Sharon Jones documentary isn’t quite a career-spanning compilation, but provides the unflinching honesty and ceaseless vitality that abounds in her life and music.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: Miss Sharon Jones! OST

Miss Sharon Jones! OST

The Sharon Jones survivor story is well-known to her loving fans: Jones beat pancreatic cancer in 2013 and circumvented the music industry more than a dozen years earlier. She’s never been short on insight or frankness when confronting those matters, as seen at the 2014 EMP Pop Conference keynote panel and her recent appearance on Billboard's Soul Sisters podcast. The documentary Miss Sharon Jones!, directed by two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA; American Dream), is an unflinching *verite *account of both those fights. It’s a must-see for fans, but also an insightful intro for neophytes who’ve only heard the Dap-Kings on Amy Winehouse records.
So what do those neophytes get when they pick up the soundtrack? It’s odd to categorize the release outside the context of the film itself. This isn’t quite a Greatest Hits, and if it were, there’d be plenty of omissions worth griping about: no “Stranded in Your Love,” no cover of “This Land Is Your Land,” no appearance of the debut Daptone single “Got a Thing on My Mind” or anything else from her name-making 2002 debut Dap-Dippin’ With...? But burdening the album with those kinds of gripes is mostly a matter of unfair expectations. A bigger question is why the *Miss Sharon Jones! *soundtrack doesn't take advantage any of the live performances that appear in the film. With a reputation earned in part due to her F-5 tornado stage presence, that’s a big letdown.
But it’s damn near impossible to put together even a mediocre Sharon Jones compilation, and the soundtrack* looks at her career from a unique angle. As a kiss-off to a no-good man retrofitted to her defiant stand against her disease, “Retreat!” belongs at the top of the tracklist. It’s become an anthem that embodies what she and the Dap-Kings do in the face of turmoil—and may very well be, after all this time, her signature song. The film also seems to posit 2007’s 100 Days, 100 Nights as Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings’ signature album, with five of its 10 songs (including the Motown-inflected “Tell Me,” the Etta James-ian soul-blues of “Let Them Knock,” and the slinky title cut) making up nearly a third of this soundtrack. And cuts from succeeding albums I Learned the Hard Way and Give the People What They Want *round things out, making *Miss Sharon Jones! *more of a synopsis of her and her band’s last 10 years than the deeper examination fans might hope for.
Yet despite the tunnel-vision tracklist that relies too much on the movie’s narrative, there are a couple surprise gems lurking in this collection. “Longer & Stronger,” lifted from another soundtrack (2010’s For Colored Girls), is a Southern soul ballad that reveals Jones’ resilience against the bullshit, even before she faced her health issues. Hearing her testify that “Longer and stronger, that’s how I live/The more I get, the more I got to give” is all the evidence you need. And the closer “I’m Still Here,” newly recorded for the soundtrack, is the autobiographical soul of the album that ties in her upbringing, her struggles, and her perseverance into the force she’s become today. Naturally, its brassy arrangement and Jones’ enduring voice make for one of the most vibrant and energizing tracks on the album, and maybe the group’s entire catalog. It’s a vital primer for those who haven’t familiarized themselves with Sharon Jones, and a reaffirming bolt of lightning for the fans who have.