The hyped-up mixtape from the UK rap crew is without narrative and full of static posse cuts, but its production is terrific and it is a respectable capitalization on their rabid fanbase.

Soundcheck

There’s an energy bursting out the UK rap scene that demands recognition; a swarm of underground producers and hungry MCs spitting furious anger on mixtape after mixtape, propped up without radio play, major label support, or even much recognition from the old guard of grime—just millions and millions of YouTube views.
Now that Stormzy is an (unsigned) household name in the UK and making records with Ed Sheeran, he’s proven that the road to success from the underground doesn’t run through a record label. And the (also unsigned) Section Boyz, his mates from Croydon, have emerged from the same YouTube Coliseum that elevated him to stardom, riding high off their Don’t Panic mixtape and its hit single “Lock Arff” and a high-profile collaboration with Skepta (“#Worst”). And earlier this year, they were blessed with the career Miracle-Gro that is a Drake co-sign, sharing the stage with the World’s #1 Rap Singer at both clubs and arenas in London. So now that they’ve got the mic (and our attention), what do they have to say? Despite the depth of their six-man crew on their latest mixtape, Soundcheck, the answer is surprisingly little.
Of course a seasoned culture vulture like Drake would be attracted to some real-life Top Boys; Section Boyz’s gangsta posture certainly feels authentic, their hood tales of trapping, shooting, and smashing believable enough. But you won’t find a single coherent narrative among the record’s bloated 19-song tracklist, just a string of posse cuts loosely connected by a general theme of thuggishness. As a format, the posse cut generally rewards wordsmiths, eschewing pop structures in favor of a raw platform from which to demonstrate lyrical prowess. But for these lyrical lightweights and their rudimentary rhyme schemes, it’s like skydiving without a chute—their banality laid bare for all to see.
The vocals on Soundcheck, filled with English slang and Caribbean patois colored by thick accents, are distinctively British. But much of the production—pulled from more than a dozen mostly unknown up-and-comers—has more in common with Chicago drill (“Me Too”) or Atlanta trap (“OMDs”) than anything from the UK. And lyrically, Section Boyz are at least as talented as some of those scenes’ more popular mediocre rappers—such as Chief Keef or Lil Yachty—though the cultural divide of the Atlantic ocean may prove too large for them to achieve similar success stateside. That being said, the tape is filled with beats that knock, serving as a showcase for some of the underground's more promising young producers, such as London teen Mikabeats (“Loading”), the production trio HeavyTrackerz (“I Like” and “Mee Too”), and Australia’s Keanu Beats (“Good Stuff”), who just landed a track on the new Migos record Culture.
Soundcheck is at its strongest when the group works within the traditional 140 bpm grime structure, like the rousing “Army,” built from ominous strings laced with automatic gunfire. When considered in the context from which it sprung—the online rap battles between scores of hungry MCs—the mixtape is a respectable capitalization on a rabid fanbase that propped the Section Boyz up as their chosen champions. On its own, it’s considerably less impressive, a hollow tone poem that evokes the spirit of a South London housing estate without stating anything particularly urgent or interesting. It sounds best from the middle of a mosh pit at a club, or blasted through open car windows from a fiberglass-rattling system—any situation in which the beats trump the bars, where getting hyped is paramount.


Shapeshifting UK veterans abandon electronics and krautrock for another excursion into trad-rock and garage-blues.

Riot City Blues

It's not totally impossible that sometime in the future, some intrepid soul might be able to sing a lyric like "there's no sun in the sky, no love in my life/ Since I lost my baby, all I do is cry" over mandolins and honky-tonk pianos and manage not to sound like a complete dipshit. But chances are that person isn't going to be a white middle-aged British ex-raver rockstar with a fake American accent and an affected garage-rock yelp.
Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie has made a career of stacking genres on top of each other into huge messy glorious piles of acid-house and krautrock and shoegaze and Stooges, and that approach has given us Screamadelica and Vanishing Point and XTRMNTR. But whenever he dips his toe into trad-rock formalism, that adventurous streak dries up right away and mutates into stifled reverence. 1994's Give Out But Don't Give Up was the first time he humped the desiccated corpse of garage-blues, and it resulted in Primal Scream's artistic nadir, but it had a certain horn-tinged exuberance and a couple of good hooks.
Riot City Blues, Gillespie's new trad-move, on the other hand, is flat and dead. It's as if Primal Scream have run completely out of ideas and so they've reverted to the detestable fallbacks of honking harmonicas and bar-band choogles, acting like college freshmen who just discovered blues.
"Nitty Gritty" is straight up circa-2003 garage-rock pastiche; it shoots for the Stones and ends up with the Datsuns. "Dolls" is a desperate grab for handclappy glam-rock stomp-sniff hedonism so forced and clumsy that it should be in a Sparks commercial. "Boogie Disease" includes the lyric "I'm the garbage man, I'm the garbage man/ Stick my fingers in your trashcan," which is especially ridiculous because everybody knows British people say "bin." The album is packed to the gills with empty signifiers: yelps and sneers and party-up exhortations, but it's so limp and defeated that it's impossible to hate; you just end up feeling sorry for it instead.
Even in its relatively ok moments, the album fails. The decent forbidding-throb bassline of "When the Bomb Drops" makes me feel bad for Scream bassist Mani, who has now been roped into the second retro-rock disaster of his career after already weathering the Stone Roses' Second Coming. "Country Girl" has a nice little guitar-and-mandolin bite that reminds me of Miranda Lambert's "Kerosene", but it just makes me wish I was listening to "Kerosine". And the six-and-a-half minute breathy monolithic psychedelic-flute drone of "Little Death" reminds me how welcome it is to have Espers around doing this sort of thing without all the cheesed-out garage-rock moans and sneers.
Primal Scream's last album, 2002's Evil Heat, wasn't great, but its scratchy blissed-out electro-clangs yielded a few powerful moments. Gillespie always manages to come up with something interesting when he errs toward hazy rave-casualty fuzz-bombs instead of the blooz-rawk yelps that not even Jack White can pull off properly anymore. After Riot City Blues, someone needs to point a Men In Black memory-eraser at him and make him forget the Mississippi Delta ever existed.


This two-disc retrospective touches on several phases of Ghanaian vocalist Pat Thomas' career, pulling highlife, swing jazz, Afrobeat, psychedelic rock, reggae, funk, and disco into his joyful orbit.

Pat Thomas: Coming Home (Original Ghanaian Highlife & Afrobeat Classics 1967-1981)

As this compilation gets underway, with the Broadway Dance Band's big-band highlife number “Go Modern,” the first thing you notice is the enveloping ambient charm of the recording, which sounds closer to a 78-RPM record from the 1940s than the mid-’60s document that it actually is. The next thing you notice is that the guitar and the horns are out of tune with one another—just one of several small touches that give Coming Home its distinct personality, especially in its first half.
A two-disc retrospective that touches on several phases of Ghanaian vocalist Pat Thomas’ career, Coming Home presents Thomas fronting over a half-dozen different bands. Inspired at an early age by the likes of Nat King Cole, Miriam Makeba, and Stevie Wonder, Thomas was a more raw-edged singer and can be heard pushing the mic to distortion often on this set as he offers his own version of a Sam Moore-style croon.
Just as significantly, the sequencing retraces Thomas’ long-running musical relationship with guitarist/arranger/bandleader Ebo Taylor. Instrumental in Thomas’ career getting off the ground, Taylor had already established himself with the Broadway Dance Band for almost a decade before giving Thomas his break as the band’s lead vocalist. Taylor and Thomas fell into a comfortable creative rapport almost instantly, with Taylor writing the music but also coming up with song titles for Thomas to write lyrics for. The pair have worked on and off ever since (as captured most recently by Thomas & Kwashibu Area Band’s self-titled album from 2015). Aside from Taylor, the different groupings of musicians on Coming Home occupy the spotlight almost as much as Thomas does.
In the mid- to late-20th century, as African societies engaged in complex dances with post-colonialism and modernity, it was no coincidence that new strains of music began to sprout rapidly throughout the continent. A key aspect of the creative surges that swept through Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and elsewhere in the ‘60s and ‘70s was the willingness of homegrown musicians to embrace influences from the Western Hemisphere that owe their existence to Africa in the first place.
Of course, Coming Home reflects this dynamic, as Thomas and company navigate the confluence of highlife, swing jazz, Latin jazz, Afrobeat, psychedelic rock, reggae, funk, and disco. At times, the results veer a tad too close to ripoffs. The Pat Thomas and Marijata track “Brain Washing,” for example, sounds like an uninspired cover band trying to concoct a mashup of Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” with Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Not only does the Marijata track come off as naive, it contains virtually no trace of the environment it was created in. There are other moments when Thomas’ choice to sing in his native Akan dialects of Fante and Twi isn’t enough on its own to truly set the music apart.
Luckily, this turns out not the case on most of the album’s 23 tracks. In fact, Coming Home includes four other tunes by Marijata that demonstrate the group’s range. All of the bands included here—Ogyatanaa Show Band, the Black Berets, the Sweet Beans, and The Big ‘7’—wear their influences on their sleeve, but they also manage to spice them up just enough. On “Revolution,” for instance, the Sweet Beans subtly re-invent reggae as a more limber, light-footed form, the song’s slippery bass line immediately recognizable as somehow more “African” than Caribbean.
Likewise, on “Set Me Free,” the Sweet Beans hint at but don’t quite dip all the way into Latin rhythms and horn textures, choosing instead to stay in a kind of limbo between Latin jazz and ragtime, with a snaking saxophone melody that betrays the music’s Ghanaian roots. It is at these moments, where the music doesn’t quite plant both feet in any one style, when Coming Home sounds most fresh. In fact, some of the combinations that Thomas and these bands come up with suggest that these musics are still fertile ground for new combinations.
The contrasts between the two discs are sharp, as disc one focuses on the ’60s and ’70s while disc two documents Thomas’ work as an exponent of the burger-highlife movement that took off in Germany in the ’80s. And, sure, the drum machine on the more modern track “Gyae Su (1)” speaks to its time period, but for the most part the second disc lacks the heavy recording coloration—and spunk—of the earlier material.
On the other hand, on tracks such as the nearly 15-minute lament “Mewo Akoma,” Thomas’ maturity shines through in his lyrics about familial estrangement. Appropriately enough, the twinkling guitar that defines highlife music gets traded in here for a significantly more subdued line that matches the song's weariness.
A mixed bag by definition, Coming Home could nevertheless have been sequenced to play more like an album and less like a guided tour. Of course, as a guided tour it inspires the listener to dig deeper into not only Thomas’ work, but the stylistic and cultural origins of his music. Which is to say: it succeeds.


The Atlanta singer/producer Abra makes vintage, '80s-sounding R&B with the production values and aesthetic of bedroom pop.

PRINCESS

Approximately 300 hours of video is uploaded onto YouTube every minute. A significant portion of that 300 hours is probably made up of webcam videos and acoustic covers. It’s a hallmark of the site, a rite of passage for any teenager with an acoustic guitar. It’s also how Abra, an Atlanta based singer/producer got her start. Around six years ago, she started uploading covers of rap and R&B and indie rock songs onto her YouTube page. Her choices ran the gamut from Gucci Mane to Radiohead; in her most popular video, a cover Waka Flocka’s “No Hands,” she layers the song with multiple recordings of an a capella track of her own voice presumably playing from laptop speakers. She misses her cues, perhaps purposefully, giving the cover a cleverly messy style. Unbeknownst to her at first, these videos somehow got in the hands of Father, rapper and founder of Awful Records. They were both students at Georgia State at the time, and on the urging of him and the other artists in the Awful collective at GS, she started to pursue making original music.
She shared her first piece of original music two years ago, a YouTube upload called “Needsumbody.” The song was a shuffling ’80s- inspired piece of alt-pop, endearingly rough-and-tumble in quality. The mix was characteristically scattershot, her voice uneven but louder than the other elements, hissing ambient echoes and muted drums. Its muddy and moody quality recalled the acerbic gurgle of King Krule or the smeared-lens experiments of How to Dress Well. It’s not meant to sound beautiful in any way, but her music instead gathers together all the fraying signifiers of bedroom pop: essentially an Instagram filter for music that wants to be asymmetrical and fashionably color outside the lines.
This song, and almost everything she’s released (two mixtapes with Awful) since, has been self-produced, and recorded in her Atlanta bedroom closet. This includes her most recent release, an EP called Princess (her first major label release) which bears a strong stylistic quality to even her earliest work, including the acoustic covers of rap songs. A sense of perfect imperfection unifies all of her work, which, for better or worse is an attitude that doesn’t work for Abra.
Princess is a short piece of music, less than thirty minutes long. It’s more a progress report on Abra’s growth than a fully fleshed-out release. As such, its similarity to so much of her early work is, if not damning, then a little disappointing. From the opening moments of the EP to its closing second, what you can expect is a uniform sound built from bright, impressionistic drum machines and warm synths. In the EP’s opener “Come 4 Me,” she uses the same vocal layering technique she used in the Waka Flocka cover, albeit with more skill. In the next song “Vegas,” she ratchets up the ’80s facsimile, slathering on the 808 brushstrokes. Her voice gets lost in the murky collage of noises, and when brief snatches of her words bob up to the surface, they can be funny in their cliche (“If you wanna roll the dice on me okay/If you think you can afford it/Come play”).
Her music has been compared by critics in the past to Janet Jackson “demos,” a kind of backhanded compliment implying that the quality of her sound and skill is meant to live in a dusty archive until the light of day deems it necessary to be uncovered yet again. At its best, this EP looks like a creatively executed painting done by numbers. All the markers of homemade alt-R&B are colored in, but it makes the product at least a little rote. Those vintage sounds and the underdog spirit of bedroom DIY, are, at this point, aesthetic presets. Behind the nostalgic tropes, there is a confident and self-possessed artist waiting to get out. But it’s a little hard to hear in the cramped space of a bedroom closet.


Like Death Magnetic, Metallica’s latest is an attempt to revisit their early days. The only difference is that this time they sound like they’re actually trying, and maybe even having a bit of fun.

Hardwired...to Self-Destruct

The past twenty five years haven’t exactly been kind to Metallica. Ever since their mainstream-rock apotheosis on 1991’s Metallica, they’ve faced a quarter-century losing streak: the bloated hard rock of Load, Reload, and Garage Inc., the snoozy live album-cum-orchestral-experiment S&M, the migraine-inducing ineptitude of St. Anger, and the recycled rage of Death Magnetic. In 2011, they teamed up with Lou Reed for Lulu, a collaborative concept album regarded by many as music’s answer to The Room—if Tommy Wiseau’s classic was twice as ambitious and half as competent—and the band’s undeniable low point (and that’s even with the tell-all masochism of 2003’s documentary Some Kind of Monster).
Money, fame, age, a lack of passion: Critics have floated several culprits for the mediocrity of latter-day Metallica. But as drummer Lars Ulrich suggested in a recent Rolling Stone interview, the wellspring of the band’s foibles also forms the basis of Metallica writ large. “The thing that I love about Metallica is that we’re very impulsive,” Ulrich said, before tacking on a subtle mea culpa: “That impulsivity occasionally bites us in the ass, because we jump before we know where we're landing.”
And so, five years after hooking up with Lou, and eight years after their last album proper, Metallica have taken yet another leap with Hardwired...to Self-Destruct, a two-disc collection demarcated not by a leap into the unknown, but into the halcyon days of their youth nearly three decades ago during thrash’s primordial period, when “impulsivity” amounted to unpredictable fretwork, breakneck rhythms, and discarded pretenses. Like Death Magnetic, the record attempts a self-conscious return to form; the only difference is that this time the band sound like they’re actually trying, and–dare I say it–maybe even having a bit of fun.
Hardwired...to Self-Destruct is a rare Metallica album without any Kirk Hammett songwriting credits, a  shift owed not to Some Kind of Monster-type bickering, but flat-out carelessness: The guitarist lost an iPhone containing roughly 250 riffs, leaving him with little to contribute to the think tank by the time Metallica began cutting the album. Temporarily demoted from puppet master to personnel, Hammett readily embraces–relishes, even–his role as primary ambassador for Metallica nostalgia. Hardwired… stands as the guitarist’s most extensive show of muscle since the self-titled days. From the soaring, bluesy triplets on “Atlas, Rise!” to the fleet-footed stampedes driving “Spit Out the Bone,” his playing strikes a winning compromise between precision and wildness, lending the otherwise one-dimensional mix (undermined primarily by the anemic drum tracking, which renders Ulrich’s bass kicks little more than footsie taps) some welcome textural spontaneity.
As for spontaneity on a broader level—don’t head into Hardwired... hoping for progressive surprises or unanticipated turns. Its twelve songs–the vast majority of which extend well past the five-minute mark–fall into two categories: galloping nods to Ride the Lightning, of which the first disc is primarily composed, and doomier mid-tempo cuts à la Sabbath, which make up the bulk of the second. The LP’s highlights—“Hardwired,” “Moth Into Flame,” “Atlas, Rise!” all fall into the former camp, front-loading the record with fire. The second disc, by contrast, is a slog through nondescript, uniform chug, devoid of dynamics or instrumental nuance: “Confusion”’s dull roar proves practically indistinguishable from the slow-churning gyre of “ManUNkind” or “Here Comes Revenge,” and the clunky mainframe of “Murder One” borders on incoherent. Fortunately, they finish strong with “Spit Out the Bone,” a galvanizing, hyper-speed premonition of a world razed to the ground by man’s greed for shiny playthings (like, say, Hammett’s iPhone): “Plug into me and terminate/Accelerate, Utopian solution/Finally cure the Earth of Man.” A little less than three minutes in, the band automize fiercely, careening off the leaden path into a pummeling breakdown unheard since the glory days.
Elsewhere, James Hetfield redeems himself as Metallica’s growling figurehead with his strongest work in decades. The band’s 2014 tribute medley to fallen star Ronnie James Dio (which appears on the deluxe edition of Hardwired…) has clearly left a lasting impression on the 53-year-old, vocally and lyrically: whereas past releases found Hetfield howling the blues and roaringly introducing himself as literal furniture, Hardwired… marks a return to the matter-of-fact, staccato doomsday proselytizing of the band’s heyday. When he barks “We’re so fucked/Shit out of luck,” on the title track, teeth bared, fists clenched, we feel the pulse of his reckless youth ever-so-slightly—and for a second, the multi-millionaire feels like one of us, shaking in timely trepidation at the realization of the world’s greatest fears. And yet, even as he manages to rein in the cringeworthy wailing exhibited on St. Anger and the Load albums, he can’t resist backsliding into melodrama—obnoxiously extending out his syllables on “Now That We’re Dead” (“Now that we’re dead my DEEE-AHH we can be TOGETH-AHH”)–and on “Dream No More,” letting out a grunge-era whine that sounds like a failed impersonation of late legend Scott Weiland.
Make no mistake—Hardwired... is easily Metallica’s best album since 1991’s landmark self-titled LP, a victory on par with Weezer’s White Album for comeback of the year. But as was the case with Cuomo and company, the album fails to convince non-diehards what, exactly, we look for from Metallica these days. Even after repeat listens, one can’t shake the feeling that in 2016, the legends’ students have become their teachers in terms of both sheer volume and political gravitas; those looking for fresh thrash, in its purest, most primal form are better off listening to the likes of Vektor, Power Trip, or Iron Reagan, who wave the torch of their forebears with considerably more gusto. Still, the band couldn’t return at a better time: when you flip on the news and see a narcissistic, trigger-fingered, despotic cheetoh at the podium—a Metallica song come to life—there’s no denying that the accessible aggro makes for a surprisingly potent balm, not to mention an enjoyable form of escapism.


Billed as a country record, the San Francisco garage-rock hero’s eighth record with the Sunsets uses the genre as a means for chronicling the lives of lonesome men.

Sonny and the Sunsets: New Day With New Possibilities

New Day With New Possibilities

Sonny Smith’s New Day With New Possibilities is billed as a country album, but really, the cult San Francisco garage hero’s output with Sonny and the Sunsets has always felt like country music, even though it hasn’t always been delivered with a twang and a sigh. His best songs, about long-lost loves and fringe-dwelling stragglers, tell classic stories populated with well-worn American archetypes: They’re country at heart, even if gilded with garage-rock harmonies or post-punk synths. Then, of course, there’s Sonny himself—a troubadour out of time, content to move through life more as a chronicler of others’ lives than his own. “Everywhere I go in this world, I see lonely men/Where do we come from, where does it end, the lonely men?” he wonders on the very first line of “The Lonely Men,” New Day With New Possibilities’ spare, Callahan-esque opening track. A scene-setting overture to an album about searching, deep-seated forms of loneliness, it could just as easily be applied to the rest of Sonny’s music—a career spent profiling “broken men behind, broken men ahead.”
Although New Day With New Possibilities, Sonny’s eighth record with the Sunsets, might hew closest in genre to the fan favorite Longtime Companion, the aesthetic feels as much like a means to an end as anything else. It always has with Sonny: The reason his early records cherry-picked sounds with abandon, and the reason he could so easily write 200 songs in every genre under the sun for his 100 Records project, is because he’s always been attuned to genre as a canny literary device. So while New Day With New Possibilities taps into country’s potential to chronicle the lives of lonesome men in the same way that Longtime Companion mined the genre’s usefulness for conveying lovesickness, it actually feels, in the scheme of Sonny’s oeuvre, more of a piece with 2013’s Antenna to the Afterworld, which, in its reckoning with grief and loss, also touched on isolation: “I had a visit from a dead friend/She told me not to wallow in the loneliness.”
As if to prove the point, “Palm Reader,” a highlight from Antenna to the Afterworld, gets a reprise here. Where the original felt bright and lovestruck, brought to life by its post-punk synths and Sonny’s wry deadpan, “Palm Reader” circa 2021 is resigned: When Sonny sings, “My loveline, it’s hard to see/But it’s still there underneath,” he’s nostalgizing an affair, rather than cementing it. The only love songs on New Day With New Possibilities take this approach, looking at lost loves from an impossibly far remove. Take, for example, “Love Obsession,” a classic Sonny and the Sunsets campfire sing-along: “Heartbreak is my profession/I teach the school of rejection/Memories of you won’t let me get away,” Sonny sings, stomping along with the ease of a man who knows the only way to get through is to accept singledom as inevitability. “Earl & His Girl,” another classic in Sonny’s catalog of weirdo biographies, follows a lonely bounty hunter who tries to strike up a connection with the girlfriend of an abusive man, only to find that she’d rather stick with her boyfriend and shoot kids and squirrels. He stays positive, even after his horse leaves him, through the remembrance of a mantra: “May there be a road that takes me to where I need to go.”
If it sounds bleak, that’s because it is: New Day With New Possibilities, although as lush and pleasant to listen to as ever, showcases a darker, rawer side of Sonny’s writing. It’s a bittersweet tonic after the one-two punch of 2016’s Moods Baby Moods and 2019’s Hairdressers From Heaven, albums produced by James Mercer and Merrill Garbus, respectively, that felt like they lacked something of Sonny’s pastoral outsider charm. And although New Day With New Possibilities skews dark, there’s still plenty of warmth to be found, if you know where to look. “Just Hangin by Myself,” the record’s centerpiece, radiates contentment, finding intense satisfaction in solitude: “I’m just hangin’ out by myself,” Sonny repeats. It’s a group singalong for one, an unassuming affirmation that’s quintessentially Sonny: He’s documented loneliness so thoroughly, he might just be on the verge of finding a cure for it.

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On his fourth album as the Soft Moon, post-punk auteur Luis Vasquez finally breaks from a whisper into a scream.

Criminal

Over the course of the four albums he’s made as the Soft Moon, Luis Vasquez has slowly risen from a mire of his own making. His 2010 self-titled debut barely let his voice creep into the mix, focusing instead on pummeling post-punk rhythms, austere guitar riffs, and a bleak haze of distortion. The vocals were hardly the point; Vasquez rarely sang above a whisper, opting to drown the most obviously human element of his music in a miasma of deliriously goth instrumentals. Eight years later, he seems to be waking up from the nightmare. Vasquez’s new album, Criminal, batters down the restraints that choked back his voice in the past, letting him break from a whisper into, finally, a scream. If it isn’t his most nuanced record, it’s certainly his most decisive.
Written in a small basement studio in Vasquez’s current home city of Berlin, Criminal thrashes with an anger that the Soft Moon has never fully indulged before. “I’ve been spending the last eight years trying to heal myself, and it hasn’t been working, so [this record is] kind of an act of desperation,” Vasquez said in a recent interview. Like 2015’s Deeper before it, this LP grapples with the residue of childhood trauma, examining the shape a psyche can take when its formative years are toxic. Vasquez doesn’t use lyrics as a storytelling tool—his words come out in shards, not narratives—so there’s plenty of room to interpret the seething sentiments peppered throughout the album. “This guilt is a problem/You’re the ghost of my problem,” he chants in a steely monotone on “Like a Father,” a song he says is “about the father [he] never had.” While a few other lines direct their anger toward an ambiguous “you,” most of Criminal addresses a deep-seated self-loathing. “I wish I could be somebody else/Cause it burns,” Vasquez howls on charging opener “Burn,” his voice vaulting a tune that’s about as close to a traditional hook as the Soft Moon gets.
Vasquez’s melodies sweeten on Criminal, but their catchiness stands in contrast to the severity of the album’s texture and subject matter. It’s a trick wielded expertly by industrial-pop acts like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson: Load up an earworm with arsenic and let your listeners have their pleasure and pain at the same time. Yet instead of sounding like a deep cut from The Fragile, as Soft Moon tracks often did in the past, Criminal edges closer to the aggressive and delightful mix struck on Pretty Hate Machine. Vasquez begs masochistically for someone to “Take your time/Crush me right” on the stuttering, bass-heavy “Choke,” whose primary riff carries so much momentum it ought to be lapped up as soon as possible by a goth-adjacent rap act like Danny Brown or Vince Staples. And “The Pain” orbits a descending bass line that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Interpol’s radio-friendly compositions, the instrumental melodies counterbalancing the abject tone of Vasquez’s voice as he asks, “How can you love someone like me?”
Much of the music Vasquez has made to date has felt like a cocoon blocking out the world, hiding something impossibly dark at its center. Some of Criminal falls in that vein; there’s a superfluous instrumental called “ILL” lodged in its lagging Side B, and “Born Into This” masks his vocals to the point of near-illegibility. But the best of this album shows Vasquez piercing through his self-protective veil, exposing raw nerves and real pain. Inside all that darkness lurks a shuddering will to live.


One of modern rap’s most well-oiled machines has officially ventured into film. And while their debut soundtrack doesn’t hit the highs of their studio projects, it continues the tradition of bolstering an under-represented city.

Various Artists: Griselda & BSF: Conflicted (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Griselda Records has earned a reputation for flooding every market they touch. The Buffalo collective’s six active members—nominal leader Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine, Benny the Butcher, Armani Caesar, and latest signees Boldy James and YN Billy—released a combined seven projects in 2020 and have also exerted their influence in the worlds of fashion, sports, and wrestling. It’s no surprise, then, to see them extend their brand of gutter rap to the world of movies, like Roc-A-Fella and No Limit Records before them. Conflicted, the debut feature from the newly formed Griselda Films, is no Paid in Full, but its portrayal of life on and off the streets of Buffalo is earnest and heartfelt, the kind of DIY project you’d proudly buy in an unmarked case for around $10 from the corner-store bootleg rack. Even with its hometown love on its sleeve (the film is dedicated to DJ Shay, who died from COVID-19 complications last year), the film’s accompanying soundtrack, Griselda & BSF: Conflicted (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), does much of the atmospheric heavy lifting.
Naturally, the soundtrack lives and dies by the new-era boom-bap Griselda has made their name on since the mid-2010s. It’s a showcase for the group (with the exception of a notably absent Conway) and a handful of Benny’s Black Soprano Family affiliates, with special guests and audio clips from the movie sprinkled throughout. Songs like “Mobbin” and “Ain’t Hit Nobody” are standard fare, steely-eyed accounts of drive-bys and gold chains anchored by cold and unforgiving loops.
Gunn and Benny can churn out these kinds of songs in their sleep, yet they bring enough energy to occasionally dazzle. Gunn sounds as colorful as ever on single “The Hurt Business,” reminiscing on watching 106 & Park with his shades on while in federal prison. Benny’s standalone song “3:30 in Houston” is both a flex anthem and a bouncy rejoinder to the attempted robbery and shooting he experienced in a Walmart parking lot last year and the ensuing media circus (“Fuck all the bloggers, the niggas who shot me/Fuck all the opps and fuck Wendy Williams/Can’t trust nobody, it’s all smoke and mirrors”). The paranoia and opulence dovetail with the film’s own sense of encroaching dread.
While Griselda continues to hold it down—Boldy James and Armani Caesar never cease to amaze—the Conflicted soundtrack springs to life when outside voices take center stage. Underappreciated New York stalwart Lloyd Banks turns in career-best work on “Element of Surprise.” Black Soprano frontrunner Heem consistently stands out, particularly on the throbbing “Voices” (“My uncle told me use the gauge, no Boyz n the Hood/Leave you Ricky on the couch if that trigger get pulled”). Elcamino, Rick Hyde, and Smoke DZA ride DJ Shay’s blaring horns to victory on the roaring “Squaaaaad.” For all the highlights, though, there are a handful of fumbles. “Rank,” YN Billy’s first solo song on a Griselda project, has energy but lacks personality. Dave East’s phoned-in verse stalls the otherwise lively “Welcome Home DMX.” Armani Caesar’s solo cut “Nerve of You” feels more like a leftover idea from The Liz than a fully fleshed-out record. These songs fit the motif but feel undercooked by comparison.
At this point, Griselda is one of the most well-oiled machines in modern rap, their aesthetic and extended universe of collaborators perfectly suited to the world of soundtracks. Conflicted makes a game effort, offering a spattering of decent-to-good songs for FlyGods and young bulls alike. It may not hit the highs of their studio albums or mixtapes, but it continues the tradition of bolstering one of rap’s most under-represented cities.

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On his latest EP as the Soft Pink Truth, Drew Daniel of Matmos offers a luxe version of deep house that leans into the carnal qualities of club music.

Was It Ever Real?

Comparing Matmos to Coil seems crass. They’re the two most famous gay male couples to make smart, sensual, experimental electronic music together, and for the most part, that’s where the similarities have ended. But when you’ve made a record as shudderingly sexual as Drew Daniel’s new Soft Pink Truth EP Was It Ever Real?, and you put a cover of “The Anal Staircase” by Coil on it, and you’ve been with one guy for 29 years: That’s when you start to wonder how much Daniel likes playing the John Balance to M.C. Schmidt’s Sleazy.
Was It Ever Real? gives the impression of a brawny, fulfilling eroticism. The title alone of “Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?,” not to mention the seductive moans and sighs that flutter throughout the mix like plumes of smoke, make the record’s preoccupations clear from its opening moments. Coil’s original 1986 “Anal Staircase” is a Stravinsky-sampling bruiser that seems to invite the listener to hitherto unknown pleasures, but Daniel replaces the unsettling laughter on the original with a smattering of lounge ambiance, and Balance’s screams simmer down to a close-mic’d whisper. This is a vision of sex not as something forbidding or forbidden but a healthy component of a comfortable life. The anal staircase is carpeted in velvet.
Daniel commits to a luxe version of deep house on these four tracks, ripe with vestiges of disco. The bass is big and plummy, and electric pianos mumble and splutter. The title track exists to flex this style. Acetone’s Mark Lightcap soars with a guitar lead that brings to mind the ‘70s-sleaze Shaft school of seduction, while a harpsichord performance from Tom Boram elevates the whole thing into the kind of orgiastic paradise-garden fantasy Prince conjured on the late-‘80s deep cut “Adonis & Bathsheba.” The pitch-shifted hi-hats, which seem to squelch through mud, impart a whiff of the peaty fertility of early-2000s albums by Matthew Herbert (whose challenge to Daniel to make house music led to the start of the Soft Pink Truth).
Much of the Soft Pink Truth’s catalog is devoted to provocative electronic tributes to genres like hardcore, black metal, and crust punk. This is his first project-length pastiche that isn’t a complete subversion, and it continues the turn away from “angry-white-guy music” that Daniel commenced on 2020’s beatific Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? Like that record, Was It Ever Real? is a luxe, collab-heavy work that’s easier on the ears than most of his music. Unlike Sinning, this is a straight-faced genre experiment, leaning into club music’s carnal qualities without exaggerating them or sending them up, tunneling toward the center of classic deep house rather than scratching at its margins as Daniel did on his 2003 debut Do You Party?
As such, it’s the Soft Pink Truth release that’ll most comfortably fit into most DJ sets and road trips. (Daniel will elaborate even further on this style in October, when he’ll release a full-length called Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?) In the absence of the project’s usual puckish unpredictability, the appeal of Was It Ever Real? lies largely in hearing Daniel focus all his attention on a single sound while infusing it with a genuine eroticism that’s sexy not because it’s brazen, brash, or foul-mouthed, but because it’s lived.


The Seoul producer and one-half of the electronic group Salamanda makes effervescent, maximalist music. Her new EP is her most dynamic and evocative solo release yet.

B_B EP

Taking cues from ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura and Studio Ghibli filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, Seoul duo Salamanda conjure vivid fantasy worlds with richly tactile sounds: mallets striking, objects plunking, vocal cords pushing air through pursed lips. Yetsuby, one half of the duo, takes a similarly physical approach to sound in her solo work. But where Salamanda’s music often conveys a sparkling, childlike quality—call it the psychedelia of innocence—Yetsuby’s solo records have often been more chaotic. She twisted up synthetic sounds on 2019’s Heptaprism and leaned toward Two Shell-style overload on last year’s shuddering My Star My Earth. Her new EP, B_B, is her most dynamic and evocative solo release yet. It sounds like a geyser of ball bearings, or a plasticine rainbow, or a marimba the size of a bridge.
Both Yetsuby and Salamanda have long displayed ambient leanings, but “Who Swallowed the Chimes at the Random Place,” which opens the EP, is the closest she’s come to crafting something that might be filed within the genre. Softly rounded synth arpeggios bubble expectantly; chimes flicker across the stereo field; jagged streaks of tone occasionally resemble Jon Hassell’s prismatic horn. Still, despite the music’s incidental feel and the absence of drums or melody, the mood is anything but chilled. The moving parts are unpredictable and the placid, new-age tones are offset by metallic bursts and an overarching air of turmoil. The piece belongs to a contemporary strain of hyper-digital music whose organizing principle is gestural in nature, as though Yetsuby had reached into the virtual space of her DAW and smeared the sounds into a shimmery blur.
At five minutes long, “Who Swallowed the Chimes” is both the longest and the most formless of the EP’s six tracks. The rest of the record zigzags between streamlined rhythmic studies and maximalist amalgamations of IDM and hyperpop. But no matter the style, a sense of mischief reigns. The brief, percussive “If I Drink This Potion” traipses along at a relatively restrained 112 beats per minute, yet everything seems designed to make it feel faster and more hectic than it is: Drums explode into effervescent clouds, and the downbeat constantly shifts, lending the impression of a frantic jog across liquefying sand. Things settle down on “1,2,3, Soleil,” a 90 BPM head-nodder whose thumping log drums and elastic, dancehall-inspired syncopations could easily pass for a Salamanda track. But Yetsuby can’t resist her habitual impishness: Dappled flute accents soon cede the way to garish splotches of synth, and 32nd-note arps take off like a runaway train, tipping the groove toward singeli’s breakneck gait.
Yetsuby is at her most dulcet on “Maxilogue: Potion, Materials,” a sculptural assemblage of chiming synths and sing-song vocoder that gently swells to a full-spectrum climax—dissonant, but somehow soothingly so. She’s at her most intense on “Poly Juice,” piling tiny slivers of sound onto a snapping electro rhythm reminiscent of the early-’00s IDM of labels like Schematic, and topping it all off with sweetly robotic vocal processing. But ultimately, both tracks feel like two sides of the same iridescent coin. On both—and the same goes for the dreamy, Blade Runner-inspired closer, “The Sublime Embrace”—every iota of the stereo field teems with microtonal detail. In Yetsuby’s universe, categories like ambient and club music are largely a question of perspective. At the root of it all is a riot of motion, she seems to suggest: Zoom in far enough on even the most seemingly static object, and you’ll find a field of atoms whirling like dervishes.


The cosmic country of the Brooklyn singer-songwriter is both wry and heartfelt, offering a kind of tongue-in-cheek spiritual audit for a modern age.

The Freelancer’s Blues

Late in The Freelancer’s Blues, the second album from the could-be country singer-songwriter, Dougie Poole heaves out a confession that barely approaches hyperbole: “How sweet it would be to not have a brain.” This ability to approach mid-level malaise with empathy and a smirk sits at the heart of his songs—it’s a pleasure to witness. There’s the three overlapping protagonists on “Vaping on the Job,” each of whom turns to a pocket sacrament for relief on the clock, with thudding percussion mirroring the heavy sigh that accompanies such a move. The concept of workplace vaping is its own kind of “Take This Job and Shove It” for those too broke, tired, or burned out to make the rallying cry themselves; Poole’s salute makes for a woolier companion to Brandy Clark’s “Get High.”
The Freelancer’s Blues clocks on the spectrum of “cosmic country” with some extra synths thrown in for good measure. Poole’s loose approach gives him the ability to smudge and slip between the boundaries of AM-gold country and the wry modern observations of rapscallions like Joshua Tillman. It bears a covert spirituality that speaks to a larger sense of finding calm in situ. Poole’s philosophizing is humble and unobtrusive, braiding neatly with the album’s fuzzy scenery. And though country music has often been lumped in among the signifiers of white evangelical Christianity, Poole shares his own conclusions on how to connect with higher meaning without so much liturgical baggage. The idea powers “Buddhist for a Couple Days,” where Poole waxes about searching within over a bar-band shuffle. “All you gotta do is breathe and you can set those troubles free,” he promises.
Poole’s songs aren’t laments so much as lessons. His psych-lite arrangements create a more comfortable space for turning a bad ending into a new beginning. In assessing his worries, Poole recognizes that sometimes the only course of action is to shrug it off and keep moving. “Los Angeles” begins with an anxious guitar lick that parallels the opening tumble of “Jolene,” with Poole soon realizing that escaping to greener pastures won’t solve any of his problems. He finds ironic humor in pulling “California Here I Come” out of the Great American Songbook to soundtrack his turn away from a scuttled dream.
Even “Natural Touch” takes a unique angle on the awkward discomfort of encountering a fizzled-out fling in public. Rather than dwelling on the embarrassment of a not-quite-heartbreak, Poole celebrates how these incidents make room for something more fulfilling to come along. He brings back his philosophizing in a smooth croon, noting how “Sometimes you gotta be the bug, it’s true/But sometimes you’re the windshield, too.”
The most difficult element to square on The Freelancer’s Blues—which Poole’s tongue-in-cheek lyricism acknowledges—is that many of the problems rarely transcend mild to moderate discomfort. Its lack of urgency is as much a liability as it is a respite. Still, Poole’s genial attitude makes for a nudge of encouragement, channeling a quiet certainty that the sun will return from behind the clouds once again. Though it lands a bit light, Poole’s earnest vulnerability makes room for more profound reckonings to flourish in low stakes.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Hip-O-Select reissues the famed Munich producer's most complete solo effort-- one of the greatest LPs of the disco era.

From Here to Eternity

I didn't grow up with disco. Like a lot of kids, it was one of things kept hidden from me by my parents, along with my dad's Playboys and the truth about unicorns. And just as I proudly tried to convince my kindergarten colleagues about the existence of strange, horned horses, a significant part of my life has been under the impression that music made specifically for dancing was inherently crappy. Laugh now, but there are still many who believe this. My mother, for one-- of course, she also tends to say things like, "the 70s were the worst decade ever." She grew up in a different era, with different values, but she isn't the only one. We all know people who still shudder at the mention of disco (or prog or jazz or new age or any other suspiciously, popularly maligned genre of music), and for the most part, we give them their space. After all, different strokes, right?
My mother's contempt for disco has mostly to do with the fact that it (just like the decade of the 70s in general) usurped her generation's idea of "fun," transforming her into an outsider almost overnight. Sixties kids thought that having fun meant getting together with people you loved, listening to music that meant something to everyone there and looking forward to a world where a peaceful, open-minded community would have their day. To them, disco was just another reminder that materialism and obsession with self would never really go away, that their dreams weren't necessarily the way the rest of the world thought about things (even though, ironically, polyester-donned boomers were hugely responsible for disco's mainstream success).
However, I think this is different for today's kids. We grew up hearing about how bad disco was, but because we weren't actually there to decide for ourselves, most of the wisdom is second-hand. Thus, claims like "they don't even write their own songs" or "it's fake music," which were arguably valid prejudices (misguided though they sound to me) for a generation hopeful that peace, love, and understanding were universal values, mean something slightly different for us. When I say that uber-producer Giorgio Moroder was the first person to produce an entirely digital LP, it doesn't necessarily mean that his music was "fake"-- in fact, if anything, in light of most of what we listen to, it's a feather in his cap. Today's "rockists" (which is really just a fancy distinction for people who hold onto any particular set of values re: music at the expense of everything else) don't generally bring up truly interesting dichotomies of community versus self or majority versus minority. To them, music has a more abstract relationship to identity, one obscured by inherited judgments and not as easily penetrated.
Moroder is an interesting case because he sidesteps most "disco sucks" arguments due to the fact that he did write his own stuff, did produce it, and even went to so far as to design much of his studio. Like Kraftwerk, he had long been interested in the possibilities of electronic music in pop, and with partner Pete Bellotte, used his background in pop songwriting and arranging to forge one of the most successful production partnerships of the 70s. At their Musicland studios in Munich, Germany, the pair made their greatest claim to fame making records for Donna Summer, though Moroder also worked with Sparks, Blondie, and Japan, among dozens of others. His method, though behind-the-scenes as were most of the great disco producers, was hardly "fake" or dismissive of the history of recorded pop up until then; rather, like ABBA, Lee Perry, or the aforementioned Kraftwerk, he used available technology and his own ingenuity to make music as suited to its era (and beyond) as any artist could.
From Here to Eternity was Moroder's third solo LP (after 1972's underrated, if redundantly titled Son of My Father, and 1976's Knights in White Satin), and is a marvel for disco historians, and a perfect nugget of dance music for anyone else. Its opening sidelong mix predates house by almost a decade, yet would (and did) fit perfectly in the set of DJ aiming to keep people happy via Euro-centric electro beats and angelic vocoder-ized choruses. And that's the trick: there really aren't any choruses (or verses for that matter) on the first side of this record, it's a constantly evolving, perpetually changing suite of music-- which begs the question, "is this pop?" Maybe not. Or, maybe it's just one of the first visions of what pop would become for a generation of listeners who didn't necessarily need messages or refrains or catchy hooks to have fun.
Of course, given that the album opens with such a lengthy mix of music, you're better off diving in with the intention of getting lost for a while. The title track and its reprise mix now-classic Euro-house 4/4 pump (via digital kick-drum, I might add) with Moroder's distinctive, double-tracked tenor and a backing chorus of disembodied sopranos. Disembodiment was probably one of the reasons disco was supposed to suck for my parents, yet in the context of a decade when the boundless optimism and idealism of the 60s seemed suddenly, woefully inadequate, it-- along with punk's related undercurrent of disillusion-- was perfect. It was more than perfect; it was danceable! "Faster than the Speed of Love" brings the mood down from the opening track, segueing into the minimalist, ominous "Los Angeles", using a simple synth motif and striking harmony vocals to impart its momentum. "Utopia-- Me Giorgio" is more lush, with a percolating bass line and long, wistful backing vocals.
The second half of From Here to Eternity loses some of the charge, if only due to its comparatively conventional, disconnected structure. Still, the dark vocoder intro and rising intensity of soprano harmonies during the chorus of "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone" is a interestingly compact specimen of Moroder's way with a pop song, and only suffers when you compare it to his work with Summer from the same period. I don't believe there's much point in doing that though, and if the "disco sucks" brigade taught me anything, it's that using pre-formed biases and ideals to judge this music usually misses the point. Different strokes and our own ideals, right? Sounds good to me.


Like many ambitious indie bands before them, the Dodos enlist producer Phil Ek to help craft their rise to indie fame.

Time to Die

You could argue the wisdom of using something called "Fools" to sell a watery macrobrew, but when the Dodos' breakthrough song was used in a Miller Chill commercial, it went a long way towards illustrating what made its parent album Visiter such a treat-- Meric Long and Logan Kroeber kept a foot in the avant-garde with their astounding technical chops and an unvarnished recording of string buzz, drum rattle, and missed cues, all while keeping things grounded in a user-friendly acoustic pop format. At times, I wondered if I overrated it, but these days, I think it might be underrated-- if I told you Animal Collective-inspired music could be used to sell beer, what chance would you give it to turn out as good as the charmingly undecided Visiter?
Changes are afoot for this prototypical duo: Yet electric vibraphonist/percussionist Keaton Snyder isn't even the most noticeable addition to the fold on Time to Die-- producer Phil Ek is. and if you're thinking that Time to Die has a suspiciously similar sound to the Shins' Chutes Too Narrow or Fleet Foxes, now you know why. Look, Ek's call is one you gotta take if you're looking to make a leap to a new echelon of indie-fame, and the decisiveness of the album can be admirable when so many other quick turnarounds result in more of the same or guessing against a band's strengths. But while the Shins' James Mercer and Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold often use their backing bands as vehicles for vocals, but they don't have the Dodos' rhythmic force and this presentation initially plays like a misallocation of resources. Not that Long is a poor singer, far from it-- his voice remains convincingly boyish, even at its most cynical and he never loses control of his range. But as a wordsmith, he can be distractingly dodgy-- see: the anti-establishment sentiments of "Two Medicines" and "The Strums", too generic to have real bite despite featuring the record's most intriguing structure and a ingratiating, swooping chorus, respectively.
Opener "Small Deaths" begins with Long alone on guitar and vocals, and while that was the dominant sound on Visiter, there's a distinct makeover in presentation: His acoustic is more rounded, almost spongy, his voice coated with a warm, thin glaze of reverb. And then the drums come in-- Visiter crackled with the intensity of two monstrously talented musicians competing for the lead role (acoustic Lightning Bolt too much of a stretch?), but initially, it's "no, you go first." Over the wide-open chords at the start of "The Strums" you can practically hear a voiceover boasting "a new romantic comedy from the director who brought you..." "This Is a Business" bears more than a passing similarity to the ramshackle rumble of "Jodi", but it doesn't achieve the same frenetic lift-off. I've seen most of Time to Die performed live, and through that, answered the one question you'll probably have: Absolutely, these songs would sound much better if the drums were turned up.
All that said, the Dodos' charms are too strong to be held hostage by a bigger budget, even if you wonder what a guy like Brian Deck could do with it. If "Small Deaths" initially comes off as too tastefully restrained, it's only because the Dodos are allowing space between themselves and their most conventionally "epic" climax, a steady drum guiding as guitar and vibes steadily pace themselves in adding subtle fuzz tones. Likewise, early leak "Fables" may have sounded wanting for energy, but Kroeber shows a knack for a subtly ingratiating swing that emphasizes the Dodos' rhythmic gifts.
As Time to Die progresses, you slowly hear the Dodos growing more comfortable in their tonier territory. "Troll Nacht" is quite possibly the most gorgeous Dodos composition to date, an endearing and tender vocal performance by Long fitting its ease-into-Autumn glow, while the title track ends the record on a bobbing, bluesy note recalling their more Zeppelin III-inspired moments while incorporating a newfound look to harmonizing vocal loops.
So you really can't call Time to Die a disappointment, not when it actually improves on Visiter in some ways. It's not the full-out leap into "pop" that it would initially seem (for that, you'd need to hear the difference between Visiter and their self-released full-length, from back when they were called Dodo Bird), and for all its charms, Visiter wasn't exactly the tightest hour going. Time to Die bests it as far as consistency goes-- might not get a "Fools" here, but you won't get a "Park Song" either. And it's hard to envision Time to Die slowing the momentum of the Dodos' ascendance, not when their live performances are still thrilling as ever, but Time to Die comes off like a temporary decision to forgo made them lovable, flaws and all, and stress what makes them likeable.


On this collaborative album with producer Neill Von Tally, Portland via Los Angeles rapper/singer The Last Artful, Dodgr displays her gifts for melody and realism.

Neill Von Tally / The Last Artful, Dodgr: Bone Music

Bone Music

In a genre as rooted in storytelling as hip-hop, nothing—not a way with words, or an ear for hooks—is as valuable as an interesting perspective. The Last Artful, Dodgr certainly stands out in that regard: she’s a queer black woman from Portland, Oregon—not exactly a city known for its hip-hop scene. However, she also draws a great deal of inspiration from her hometown of Los Angeles, the nucleus of west coast rap. Growing up in the Midcity neighborhood, Dodgr had a front-row seat to the turmoil of the L.A. riots, a fact that she nods toward in her stage name: it’s not just an L.A. Dodgers pun wrapped in a Dickens reference, it's also an allusion to dodging bullets.
Knowing this connection, it’s hard not to hear echoes of the L.A. rap landscape in Dodgr's music: Kendrick’s melodic moments, Vince Staples’ barbed delivery, the sing-songy cadence of Boogie. Still, Dodgr’s voice is a distinctive instrument, a sharp, nasal sound that she bends into a variety of shapes. More so than with her peers, it’s hard to draw a line between her rapping and singing—in her hands, everything feels guided by a strong sense of melody. For her second full-length, Bone Music, she’s partnered with Neill Von Tally, a Portland producer whose au courant beats draw a great deal of inspiration from the atmospheric moodiness of Noah “40” Shebib and Clams Casino.
Bone Music takes its name, at least in part, from the Soviet-era practice of bootlegging banned records using X-ray film. It’s a timely reference to censorship, not to mention a fitting title for an album whose focus on the alienation of labor is near-Marxist. “All you ought to do is work/Knee pad keep to the dirt/Mine all life long/Die young, then you die young,” Dodgr raps on “LLC" before instructing, “If I die, play my beats.” Even when she's stunting, her boasts are undercut by the realities of working-class life. “I made 24 dollars on my night shift...And I’ma spend it all/Spend it all on me,” she sings on the lurching “Bleu Replica,” wherein she tries to distract herself from a cheating lover by spending what little she’s made at the club.
In the world of Bone Music, sex and death are the only escapes available from the daily grind; accordingly, more than a few of these songs focus on the former. Take the lead single “Oofda,” an escapist bedroom jam (“Spoil ya baby/Explore your cravings”) cloaked in a darkly shimmering beat. The two-part “Good/Gravy” mines similar territory, segueing from a double-time rapping workout set to gated house synths to a back-half that sounds like the sparks thrown off by some futuristic machine. There’s romantic tension here too, most notably on the airy “Foreclosed,” which finds guest vocalist Natasha Kmeto playing Dodgr’s yearning foil (a different version of the song, sung by Dodgr, appeared as “Foreclosure” on last year’s Fractures EP).
With Bone Music, The Last Artful, Dodgr assuredly steps into a lane that’s hers alone. And while her perspective certainly sets her apart, she’s hardly leaning on her identity here. Rather, Bone Music finds Dodgr extending her viewpoint into an exercise in broader, more allegorical storytelling. In an era where most rappers appeal to their listeners’ aspirations, Dodgr aims instead for reliability, zooming in on harsh realities rather than well-heeled fantasies. It’s an unusually grounded mindset for a promising young rapper, one that will likely serve her well as her profile rises.


Chrissie Hynde brings back some old bandmates for a brisk record that acknowledges The Pretenders are best when they’re direct and unadorned.

Hate for Sale

Chrissie Hynde is the only constant in the Pretenders. In the early ’80s, she suffered the twin losses of guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon. While her first official drummer Martin Chambers usually was by her side, serving as the anchor for a revolving series of guitarists and bassists, he occasionally took his leave. The pair were on the outs by 1986’s Get Close, but he returned to the fold during the recording of 1994’s Last of the Independents, and he has remained part of the Pretenders ever since, touring with the band even though he sat out every session since 2002’s Loose Screw.
Chambers returns to the studio for Hate for Sale, a brisk record that makes no apologies for relying on the flinty rock’n’roll the band has long since patented. In a sense, it’s a kindred spirit to Alone, the 2016 Pretenders LP produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys. Auerbach encouraged Hynde to rekindle the swagger and sneer of the first two Pretenders albums, assembling a cracker-jack crew of professional musicians to back her. If you didn’t listen too closely, Alone sounded like a Pretenders album, but it didn’t feel like one.
Hate for Sale, by contrast, feels like a Pretenders album. Maybe it helps that it’s helmed by Stephen Street—a producer who has long specialized in making the workaday combination of guitar, drums, and bass sound extraordinary. Street previously worked with the group on 1995’s acoustic live album The Isle of View and 1999’s ¡Viva El Amor!, so he’s familiar with their strengths and quirks, realizing they’re at their best when they’re direct and unadorned. The no-frills sound of Hate for Sale could be called a back-to-basics if Hynde had ever budged from this sound to begin with. She’s sanded its edges to glide onto adult contemporary radio, and she’s flirted with passing trends, but she’s always centered herself with those ringing guitars.
Street gives six strings plenty of room on Hate for Sale. Hynde is back playing rhythm guitar, weaving in between the leads of James Walbourne, the guitarist who also co-wrote the album’s ten songs. Most of the sounds are familiar—“Didn’t Want to Be This Lonely” bops to a Bo Diddley beat, just like “Cuban Slide” did back in 1980—but the execution is smart and precise. Often, Hynde’s words match the sonic onslaught, particularly on the album’s venomous title track and on the glammy stomp “Turf Account Daddy,” but the lyrics aren’t the focal point. Maybe that’s a good thing: when the tempo slows and the guitars fall away, it’s too easy to hear Hynde taking a jab at emotionally aware modern women, as when she sings “Feminists claim that we’re all the same/But I don’t know a man who’s felt the same shame” on the bridge of the overwrought closing ballad “Crying in Public.”
Such callousness isn’t unexpected. Despite scoring a smash adult contemporary hit with 1994’s “I’ll Stand By You,” sensitivity has never been a strong suit of Hynde’s, either on record or in public, so it is a welcome surprise for the Pretenders to deliver one of their finest ballads on Hate for Sale in the form of “You Can’t Hurt a Fool,” a slow-burner with a Memphis R&B undercurrent. The track’s understated simmer comes courtesy of Chambers, whose presence is palpable everywhere on the record. Hynde responds to the drummer’s studio return not just by writing the band’s tightest rock record in ages but by thrusting the group’s interplay to the forefront. By doing so, she makes an effective case that the Pretenders are indeed a rock’n’roll band, not a singer-songwriter in disguise.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Boston rockers’ third album wears its radicalism with confidence, and the untimely death of the band’s guitarist lends their late-capitalist protest unfortunate urgency.

Prison on a Hill

“From here on out we are Antifa-core,” Somos announced shortly after the release of Prison on a Hill. Their third album wears its radicalism on its sleeve: The title reappropriates the puritanical vision of their native Boston and Ronald Reagan’s sundowning American dream, while the cover utilizes anti-Nazi iconography. But more importantly, that’s what Phil Haggerty would’ve wanted. Somos’ guitarist passed away August 10 at age 28, and the band paid tribute by emphasizing his activism, posting local news footage of Haggerty ripping down white pride flyers.
Their label, Tiny Engines, rush-released the album for a week to help defray funeral costs, donating the overage to the Heather Heyer Foundation. While Haggerty’s death lends an unfortunate urgency to Prison on a Hill, it doesn’t fundamentally change the album so much as emphasize what it already was: a band reaching a new level of confidence making songs about the human cost of late capitalism.
Many punk bands rail against the “same 9-to-5, 16-to-65” from a position of moral superiority, whereas Somos’ breakout single “Dead Wrong” saw it as a trap that most don’t have the privilege to avoid. The average desk jockey wasn’t complacent or weak, just struggling to maintain sanity in a system that saps whatever energy could be spent trying to improve the collective lot. “We have insufficient hate for an unforgiving place,” Michael Fiorentino sang on 2016’s First Day Back, which prophetically alluded to a violent decline led by right-wing demagogues or apolitical shitposters (“You can mock anyone/You can find humor in anything”). Turns out it was both, and now Prison on a Hill surveys the suffering that results when these viewpoints gain even the slightest public legitimacy. “What do you think they’ll do to us, once they are really on the move?” Fiorentino asks on “Mediterranean,” a song inspired by the rise of anti-immigrant movements in Europe.
While Somos’ political stance isn’t new, Prison on a Hill imagines it as a message worthy of thousands, rather than a few dozen in a basement. “Mediterranean” is a surefire, almost sweatless stadium-rock groove, the kind you hear from bands destined for beer commercials and an eventual gig opening for Foo Fighters. This is not the same band whose hiatus appeared permanent after their second album First Day Back, an album that managed to sound both demo-like and overproduced, alienating fans of their more rugged debut and failing to attract new ones. Throughout 2017, the group focused their energy on activism and other projects, but eventually returned to the recording studio with ideas to match their ambitions.
Somos now operate with a newfound sense of adventure, doing everything more than in the past. The timid synth washes of First Day Back are swapped for pianos and strings on “Iron Heel” and “Mediterranean,” achieving a symphonic grandeur that might’ve once seemed overblown. “My Way to You” equally recalls the Tinkertoy beat-making of Tanlines and palm-muted pyrotechnics of early Taking Back Sunday, and delivers the album’s most unintentionally heartbreaking moment. “Thank you for the best years of your precious life” feels like foreshadowing now, even if “My Way to You” is still a quintessential Somos song, one where a faceless, domineering entity offers some kind of trinket—a medal, a retirement watch, a severance package—in exchange for human capital.
Both dominant parties in American politics—the right and center-left—caricature Antifa as jackbooted extremists, rather than guys like Haggerty who fought racism on a street level and whose obituary noted how much he enjoyed the beach and the Boston Celtics. Prison on a Hill is also variously enraged, defeated, hopeful, and dreamless—but always empathetic, even for those who find themselves on the wrong side of history because they just didn’t see other options. The “heavily armed guards/Bored out of their minds/Desperately hoping for a chance to shoot to kill” on “Granite Face” and the shellshocked veteran on “Farewell to Exile” (“I was too young to see it all”) are treated in a way that targets the military-industrial complex, rather than the enlisted. Fiorentino has frequently utilized “the killing fields” as a metaphor in his lyrics, purposefully vague about whether he’s referring to a “war of annihilation” abroad or the simple fact that everyone is battling for an ever-dwindling amount of resources. “Iron Heel” takes its imagery from Mad Max, yet when Fiorentino sings “How did it feel to be born after the gold rush?” the post-apocalyptic wasteland might as well be the gig economy. Prison on a Hill is nearly 20 minutes longer than First Day Back, and its back half is subject to an occasional midtempo lull. But at its best, it’s like a Born in the U.S.A. for 2019: synth-gilded, blue-collar rock honoring people drafted into a war they had no part in creating.


Having found unexpected happiness in her personal life, Mackenzie Scott approaches self-reflection with cautious optimism on her latest album, tentatively teasing the edges of her playful sound.

What an Enormous Room

What is there to mine, as a songwriter, when you’ve gotten everything you ever wanted? That’s been a central occupation of Mackenzie Scott, who performs as Torres, since her 2020 album Silver Tongue. The struggle to settle into settling down comes to the forefront on her latest record, What an Enormous Room. She approaches self-reflection with cautious optimism, the mark of someone who knows who they can fall back on when times inevitably get tough. “The dread doesn’t pay any rent money,” she observes on “I got the fear.” “But as long as it doesn’t get ahold of my honey/Think I’ll be alright.”
As she’s entered her thirties, Scott has taken on a second creative life as the muse and subject of her partner, the painter Jenna Gribbon, who she married in 2022. Gribbon, whose portraits of Scott graced the covers of Silver Tongue and 2021’s Thirstier, often depicts her in scenes of domestic bliss mid-action: pulling on a robe, reading a book while slouched on a camping chair, flipping channels on the TV with no pants on. That same desire to find beauty in banality—a collection of mundane moments that build up to the larger picture—permeates the songs on What an Enormous Room. Between “months of Sundays” and morning coffee, Scott can perceive loneliness, grief, and anxiety all lurking in the wings, but none of them feel quite as vivid as “the way you hold me way too tight when we sleep.”
From the glitching marching-band rhythm on Sprinter’s “Cowboy Guilt” to the lopsided ’80s pop-rock of Thirstier’s “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head,” Scott has excelled at adding a jagged, oddball edge to familiar rock structures. At its best, this album pushes further into the weird. “Life as we don’t know it,” describing a near-death experience where Scott and her stepson almost drowned, features a descending keyboard line reminiscent of the B-52’s, or a “game over” sound effect—a darkly funny representation of getting pulled underwater. (The evocative flair extends to one of Scott’s best lines to date: “Each time I looked for God, I drank a wave down every time.”) Forceful lead single “Collect” is classic Torres, pairing fuzzed-out guitar with a steadfast beat that commands attention, while opener “Happy man’s shoes” adds groovy bass and sparkling effects that turn menace into triumph. “I do not accept your shame,” Scott sings, determined as ever, now setting her sights on comfort and self-love rather than revenge.
After self-producing Silver Tongue, on Thirstier Scott returned to working with longtime producer Rob Ellis, whose ties to PJ Harvey have always made him seem like a natural match for Scott’s confrontational art-rock. But she shuffles the deck once again, co-producing the new record with Sarah Jaffe at the recently built Stadium Heights Sound studios in North Carolina. What an Enormous Room meanders more than past Torres releases; on more than a few songs, Scott’s searing guitar and punchy vocals are buried in muddy production. The standouts make it all the more obvious that “Ugly mystery” could’ve gone even harder, or “Artificial limits” might not need to drag past six minutes. Scott’s unique touch remains audible in her songs—even the scuzz of “Artificial limits” has cool ornaments, such as a Dracula-worthy organ—but it would be nice if it stood out more.
Continuing from Thirstier, Scott has traded the cynicism of her earlier work for sincerity, but that doesn’t mean she’s losing her edge. “Ugly mystery” and “Forever home” dig into the realities of codependent relationships and an impoverished childhood, and the ways expressions of care get compromised in nonideal circumstances. Still, Scott is committed to hope. On “Jerk into joy,” an ode to the nonlinear cycles of grief after tragedy, Scott repeats the mantra, “What an enormous room/Look at all the dancing I could do,” over a relatively spare arrangement of guitar, piano, and airy drums that let the entire thing breathe. You can imagine her in the proverbial space, getting her bearings, trying out moves. She’s aware of her own trepidation, but rather than fall into the abyss, she’s still game for pushing forward.


Former WU LYF frontman Ellery Roberts returns with LUH, his new project with visual artist Ebony Hoorn. Produced by the Haxan Cloak, their debut is a vast, swaggering colossus.

Lost Under Heaven: Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing

Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing

British band WU LYF began their brief career in anonymity and burned out in a press storm. Frontman Ellery Roberts, then 21, was the architect of their spectacular demise: "WU LYF is dead to me," he declared in an open letter to his bandmates, complaining that their acclaimed debut, a kind of protest album for the disenchanted, had got his revolutionary energy all messed up. "The sincerity of ‘Go tell fire’ was lost in the bull shit of maintaining face in the world we live," he wrote. Roberts’ return a year later, a solo video for "Kerou’s Lament," which depicted a little girl drenching herself in gasoline and threatening to self-immolate, felt like a reprimand to anyone still unconvinced of Roberts’ grandiose sincerity. He doubled down last November, publishing a 1000-word manifesto for LUH (Lost Under Heaven)—his new project with the visual artist Ebony Hoorn—which seemed to rally for the downfall of western capitalism.
Unsurprisingly, LUH’s debut album, Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing, is not an exercise in subtlety. Roberts’ embattled rasp still dominates, thrashing about like a blindfolded gargoyle. His lyrics, a fervid blend of self-seriousness and paranoia, pursue doomed dreams in the face of unnamed oppressors. For Roberts, music is a furnace in which to hurl the caution and humility he believes restrain us in everyday life. The result is a revelatory experience that requires no legible revelations: vocals of ecstatic defiance matched to music seemingly composed of pure magnitude; melancholic synths, sparse guitars, and bombastic strings and drums. The overall feeling is of an all-hands, against-the-odds triumph against staggering forces.
Roberts' ambition is vague enough to be limitless, and while reliably earnest, he’s uninterested in anyone’s approval. That mix could herald disaster, but Roberts, more restrained as a songwriter than singer, is smart with his flair. Produced by the Haxan Cloak, Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing is a vast, swaggering colossus, imbued with waves of reverb and gothic flourishes that meet its frontman’s astronomical intensity. "Lost Under Heaven," a magnificent shoegaze thrash, climaxes with a euphoric call-to-arms—"And we all know that it’s bullshit/They say it’s just life, and we live it"—whose crude, cheap-seats sloganeering has no right to feel so poignant.
That being said, chasing crescendos is an exhausting hobby, and the hourlong LP is hard work. It’s unclear whether LUH see Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing as playful melodrama or realism in a doomed world; either way, they came equipped for an epic task. The record’s crux is the ravey "$ORO," in which Roberts gives voice to an unrepentant one-percenter: "Once I lived a life like you/Jealous of the ease of a privileged few/But I earned a life like this ... It is something that you’ll never understand/We are born free to exploit this land." The ensuing drop, a punishing gabber beat reminiscent of Björk and Arca’s "Black Lake," turns the record on its head, clearing the slate for a reflective, romantic closing suite.
The inspiration for that turnaround is Ebony Hoorn, who apparently restored Roberts’ dwindling faith in the human race the moment they met, in 2012, at his squat in Manchester. Her spotlight moment is "Future Blues," a gorgeous ballad of languid guitars, digitized chatter, and slow, sunrise synths: "I’m so bored of this reality/Of fearful men trying to limit me," she sings, poised between despondence and third-act redemption. On "Lament," the update of "Kerou’s Lament," Hoorn concedes, "There’s still a part of me that wants your love inside of me."  Her soothing tones are a balm to listeners alongside Roberts’ arid growl, even as her presence lifts him into fits of rapturous defiance: "To the powers of hope/To the powers that be/You’ve fucked up this world but you won’t fuck with me!"
Roberts’ chronic nihilism, in WU LYF and since, often seems rooted in the ennui of aggressive individualism, where the only thing left to save is oneself (and even that’s barely worth it). "Lament" offers up a reprieve, as Roberts clasps onto love like a cliff ledge and clambers right back up, thankful for the air in his lungs. At the end of its video, the band’s initials are sentimentally repurposed: "Love Unites Humanity." From a man given to grand anti-capitalist screeds, it’s a disarmingly sweet touch.


Once again Carly Rae Jepsen’s B-sides are just as good if not better than her A-sides.

The Loveliest Time

Like the heroine of a big-budget romantic comedy, Carly Rae Jepsen presents as an eminently likable everywoman, a casually self-deprecating dreamer whose composure is no match for a sudden explosion of emotional fireworks. What elevates Jepsen’s script beyond cliché is the degree of conviction she brings to the part: her fearless ability to scale the embarrassing edge of feeling and trust-fall into her music. Like Taylor Swift, Jepsen’s gift for summoning rapturous emotion is undercut only when canned sass and cringe humor take precedence over roiling passion or clear-eyed revelation. But where Swift’s every word deepens an already cultish personal mythology, Jepsen’s persona is more broadly sketched: less identifiable with a specific sound, look, or set of quirks than a sword-wielding mandate to honor the immediacy of your heart.
Her newest album, The Loveliest Time, is a companion to and loose thematic inversion of last year’s The Loneliest Time. The third in a series of B-side albums culled from Jepsen’s ultra-productive studio sessions, it is also a concentrated dose of Weird Carly, operating at the flamboyant edges of pop convention. Where The Loneliest Time was steeped in personal loss and pandemic malaise, The Loveliest is strutting and extroverted, drunk off new love and bracingly direct about desire. It is also one of the most musically diverse in her catalog, cycling through experiments that range from go-go to French touch to quasi-IDM. So long as she sings from the heart, The Loveliest Time suggests that Jepsen’s music can tolerate an enormous amount of artifice.
With a reliable set of returning collaborators including Rostam, Patrik Berger, John Hill, and Kyle Shearer, Jepsen dips into sounds that both stay the course and swerve wildly from anything else in her discography. “Kamikaze” and lead single “Shy Boy” are familiar offerings from Jepsen, slices of weapons-grade ’80s pop that roar to life off the back of muscular drum machines and spiraling Moroder synths. But The Loveliest Time also has fascinating detours. Opener “Anything to Be With You” rides a crisp go-go drumline shot through with electric guitar reminiscent of Amerie’s “1 Thing” and achieves a similar weightless groove. Buoyed by looping vocal samples and progressively massive French touch synths, standout track “Psychedelic Switch” is a glorious surrender to sensation. The strangest song by far is “After Last Night,” a glitchy piece of Rostam-produced baroque aughts pop in the vein of “Genie in a Bottle” that Jepsen transforms into a characteristic moment of starry-eyed romantic realization.
Actual loneliness on The Loneliest Time was more of a suggestion than a central conceit, and while The Loveliest Time mostly lives up to its promise of openhearted emotion, it isn’t entirely breezy. While it’s thrilling to hear the singer call the shots with a timid hottie on “Shy Boy” or lose her conscious faculties to sheer ecstasy on “Psychedelic Switch,” Jepsen’s giddy uplift is bookended by pockets of angst on mid-tempo tracks like “Aeroplanes” and “Put It to Rest.” And while they’re perfectly serviceable songs—with some incredible drumming on the latter—their inclusion affirms that this is indeed a collection of outtakes rather than a concept album. The dusky Tame Impala-style guitar on “Kollage” and car-commercial-sized synth of “Stadium Love” likewise feel out of place. Taken as a whole, though, The Loveliest Time is a solid counterpart to its sister album, trading quiet, introspective power for brassy, headlong joy.


With stately ballads and choruses to shatter glass, the Nashville singer-songwriter’s debut builds into a record that feels deeply thoughtful and unified.

Expectations

Katie Pruitt wrote her debut album alone, but her music summons a community: bursting with drama, flourished with strings and organs, gathering to emotional crescendos that seem designed to draw a crowd. In a recent interview with The Boot, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter described how each track represents a turning point in her life: the moment she came out as gay, the hard conversations that followed, the resulting discomfort in the suburban Georgia Christian community where she grew up, the way it all affected her relationship with her girlfriend. The music reflects these personal trajectories. Her songs are patient but determined, navigating serious subjects with quiet familiarity.
Although she came up around Nashville country venues, Pruitt writes songs that feel more aligned with the last few years of indie rock. Her penchant for stately ballads with choruses to shatter glass recalls similarly introspective but explosive work by Julien Baker, while the title track pulses with the roller-rink soft rock of Jenny Lewis’ latest records. Though the label offered to pair her with bigger names, Pruitt chose to produce the album with her friend Michael Robinson, a collaborator dating back to her days playing the weddings-and-parties circuit in college. You can sense their trust in each other: Every track is given space to unfold, building into a record that feels deeply thoughtful and unified, in step with her contemporaries yet detached from any particular scene.
Along with the grand arrangements, Pruitt’s lyrics, written over four years, bind the album together. At times, she seems to respond to herself with a momentum that feels almost chronological. To the listless narrator in “My Mind’s a Ship (That’s Going Down),” there’s the casual pep talk in “Expectations.” For the painful dissonance that drives her to resent herself in “Normal,” there’s the emboldened push to follow her intuition in “Loving Her.” Giving voice to characters who feel left out by society, Pruitt occasionally runs into the same clichés that tend to box them in. But as soon as she echoes that received wisdom—say, a refrain about how the truth can set you free in “Searching for the Truth”—she exerts her own skepticism: “Everybody’s full of shit, there’s no denying,” she sings in the chorus. Many of her lyrics proceed this way, comparing lessons she thinks she should have learned by now to the ones she’s actually living day-to-day.
“I used to be ashamed to write a song that said her name,” Pruitt sings of a partner in her breakout single “Loving Her.” One of several songs that describes a struggle to feel comfortable around her own family and friends, it reckons the need to be heard against the lingering desire to hide. Her songwriting now makes no such concessions, and even her singing expresses a surging confidence; her voice could carry pop songs and torch ballads, but she instead pairs it with starker, slower narratives, highlighting characters whose doubt drives them as much as their convictions. It’s complicated subject matter from a young songwriter, and Expectations arrives with the great unburdening of saying how you feel after years of keeping it inside.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Dan Bejar’s marvelously inscrutable songwriting reaches beyond meaning. On his most live-sounding record in years, he finds clarity when language recedes and the music takes over.

Labyrinthitis

Why Tintoretto? The 16th-century painter for whom Dan Bejar titled “Tintoretto, It’s for You,” the strangest and most electrifying song on Destroyer’s 13th album, was known for his furious brushwork, according to Wikipedia. It is, of course, a tacit admission of insufficient research to be quoting from the free encyclopedia in the second sentence of a review, but in this case a throwing up of hands seems in keeping with the spirit of the work. Bejar, Destroyer’s voice and mastermind, said in a recent Pitchfork interview that the reference to Tintoretto is inscrutable even to him, but that it has something to do with skewering his own youthful pretension: “a vague recollection of me throwing around Tintoretto as a painter I liked in my 20s, just such utter bullshit.” It would be just as disingenuous for a critic with no particular knowledge of Renaissance art to act like he’s capable of further demystifying the namedrop.
But I do understand what comes next, and so could anyone who’s ever headbanged or drummed on a steering wheel. Bejar whispers the title with the theatrical menace of a cartoon supervillain, and the band goes off like a bomb: a massive synth riff, a drumbeat that acts on your body with pure physical force. You may draw some tenuous connection between this cathartic burst and what you learned on the internet about some old Venetian painter’s visceral approach to the canvas. Or you may assume that “Tintoretto” is a bit of gibberish, or a character from Shakespeare, or the name of Bejar’s cat. Either way, I think, the mystery is part of the point. Surrender to not knowing, and—if you’ll allow a Bejarian allusive non-sequitur—let the sound take you away.
Bejar has always been a cryptic songwriter, but on Labyrinthitis he seems intent on piling on associations until they reach beyond meaning itself. (He chose the title, which technically refers to an inner-ear condition, in part because it “seemed insane,” he said in the same Pitchfork interview.) With one hand, the songs invite your attempts to decipher their myriad puzzles and tangents; with the other, they push you away, luxuriating in disorientation. “June” closes with two and a half minutes of coke-dusted disco and logorrheic spoken-word, its fragmentary images—“Scrapyard angel/Wings of brass/Ash/A river called trash”—made further disjointed by Burroughs-esque cut-ups of Bejar’s voice, with certain phrases trailing off and others looped into accidental refrains. “Fancy language dies and everyone’s happy to see it go,” he sings earlier in “June,” when it still resembles a conventional song. By the end, that line starts to seem like an omen. Bejar’s war on coherence continues through the dadaistic inversion of “Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread,” an overstimulated groove over which he advises someone that “everything you just said was better left unsaid.” Maybe he’s talking to himself.
Like most Destroyer albums since 2011’s blearily triumphant Kaputt, Labyrinthitis takes the smooth and sophisticated studio-centric pop of the late 1970s and ’80s as its musical center. Certain tracks would fit right in on Kaputt, where Bejar first toned down his usual yelpy verbosity, becoming one with the strung-out grandeur of the arrangements: songs you could put on to heighten the languorous mood of a dinner party that stretches long into the night, their essential strangeness only revealing itself with focused listening. More often—as in the ending of “June,” and the explosion at the center of “Tintoretto, It’s for You”—Labyrinthitis delights in rupturing the elegance of its own facade. With four-on-the-floor rhythms and pulsating basslines, songs like “Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread” and “It Takes a Thief” gesture in the general direction of dancing, but their tempos are just a hair too frantic to support the act itself. Try moving your limbs in time and you might end up looking like a pedestrian in an old-fashioned newsreel, jumpy and unnatural, moving faster than the frame rate’s ability to keep up.
Bejar and his collaborators recorded Labyrinthitis remotely, and its impossible lushness is surely the result of some tinkering from producer/multi-instrumentalist John Collins, who assembled these isolated tracks into an album. Despite this, it has the unmistakable feeling of having been performed by an actual band, more so than any Destroyer album since 2015’s Poison Season. The music’s sense of churning aliveness comes largely thanks to drummer Joshua Wells, who brings delirious high drama to every thwack of the snare, treating even the disco-inflected numbers as if they were just power ballads played way faster than usual. His fills provide the unambiguous emotional peaks that Bejar’s songs so often withhold: crashing triumphantly in midway through “It’s in Your Heart Now,” cascading across the sunlit bridge of “All My Pretty Dresses,” charging the instrumental breaks of “It Takes a Thief” with raw adrenaline.
Listening to Labyrinthitis feels like how it might feel to be a Thomas Pynchon character: journeying circuitously toward a goal you can’t quite apprehend, accosted by signs and symbols that may be of world-historical importance if they don’t turn out to be nonsense, haunted and comforted by the intuition that all this could easily be a big joke. “Tintoretto” is loaded with semiotic baggage, going back as far as the year 1518 and as recently as Bejar’s days as a young hipster, and it’s also just a word that sounds cool before a big synth breakdown. You have to make your own way through these songs, decide what’s important and what’s just set dressing, knowing your ideas might diverge significantly from the next listener’s, or even Bejar’s own. For me, the album is at its clearest when language recedes and the sound takes over, as in the long, fragile fadeout of “The States,” which is like the music icicles might make if they were capable of singing. I find a similar clarity in the title track, a collage of synthesizer, cut-up singing, and a young child’s nonverbal speech. Listen in the right mood and it is almost unbearably tender. But you’re lying to yourself if you think you can tell me what it means.


The latest release from this Los Angeles-based Plug Research jazz-hop duo is missing something... or somebody.

Ammoncontact: One in an Infinity of Ways

One in an Infinity of Ways

An album's closing track can spoil everything, as Ammoncontact's One in an Infinity of Ways demonstrates. Before the salt is tasted in the sugar, this L.A.-based jazz-hop unit unveils several nourishing, leftfield instrumental grooves. But when Sol Uprising's Lil Sci delivers a laser-cut rap on the record's final track-- one that would perfectly complement the opener, instrumental space-out "Dreamy"-- the absence of MCs becomes glaring and the album suddenly seems like a collection of missed opportunities. Or, as Lil Sci puts it: "That's why I don't judge until I hear the half of the half." One in an Infinity of Ways, indeed. In all fairness, the incomplete-art element is what Ammoncontact's Carlos Niño and Fabian Ammon are possibly reaching for on their second album, as hip-hop and psychedelic jazz instrumentals are often left 50% done for future remixing and rapping. However, when producers can neither afford a set of guests nor rhyme worth a damn, most of the music simply falls in the background-- for good or ill.
That said, "Dreamy" falls into the good, and it can leave one seeing purple, red, and orange spots everywhere the eye glances. Bedroom-techno dandy Daedelus supplies the bass clarinet thrumps and acoustic guitar licks that dart about while a flute sample melts the cortex. As previously mentioned, the inclusion of Lil Sci's laidback rhymes about keeping your chin up during adversity may could proven that psychedelica can sell almost any public service announcement. Unfortunately, other choice MC spots also turn up two cherries with each pull of the slots.
"Healing Vibrations" has a looped Afro-jazz beat that nearly rivals the Apache break before Niño and Ammon seamlessly let the music nod off into a 2 a.m. jazz trance courtesy of bassist/guitarist Greg Malone and skinsman Andres Renteria. It's one of many moments when Ammoncontact successfully blur the line between the sampler and live instruments. The three-part "Infinity of Rhythm Instrumental" knocks listeners awake with a bludgeon by conga before settling into a methanol haze with downtempo Rhodes funk. Other fine tracks include the P-Funk bounce of, ahem, "Fun Is for Funky" and the robotic funk of "Wu Woomp Whoomp", which struggles to escape the length of its two-foot power cord.
Prefuse 73's Scott Herren has called Ammoncontact's sound "machine funk," yet it's one that is devoid of poetry. Bare-boned throwaways "Through the Moon" and "Wu Wu Woomp" (you read right) drag a tepid hip-hop beat around in circles-- dying for the verses of any li'l Johnny who found God in the Gospel according to Emniem. "Like Waves of the Sea" has a swank Latin-jazz bass riff that sadly goes nowhere, while the staccato orchestral tease "Ballad of the Untitled" sounds too incomplete to even count as a lock-groove piece. The demand for an emcee savior is exacerbated with every listen.
The nagging title One in an Infinity of Ways implies that Ammoncontact are capable of greater good, and they would've left the listener with a remarkable batch of abstract sketches-- if Lil Sci hadn't exposed the nudity of it all. I can't wait for the remixes to hopefully correct things.