After 13 years, Anohni gets the band back together for a soulful and intense record that provides a safe place to grieve nothing less than the destruction of the planet.

ANOHNI and the Johnsons: My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross

My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross

In the years since Anohni’s crushing warning of “4 Degrees,” the global temperature has become perilously close to the point of no return. We just experienced what were likely the hottest days in recorded history. That’s to say nothing of the renewed attacks on trans people, as the few political gains made in the community are jeopardized or eroded altogether through voluminous anti-trans legislation across the U.S. and intensifying legal backlash in the UK. When the Academy of Motion Pictures failed to invite Anohni to perform her nominated song about climate change, she posted an open letter, expressing a desire to “maximize her usefulness” as an artist. But it’s hard to do that in an increasingly polarized world that’s as hostile as ever towards people like her.
So Anohni did what any of us would do: She called her label and said, “I’d like to make a blue-eyed soul record.” It’s an unexpected prompt, but one Anohni hoped would bring out something personal in her voice. She was raised in the South of England on the slick crooning of Boy George and Alison Moyet, artists who mimicked the sound of Black American soul musicians overseas. “I’m just trying to be honest about where my voice… comes from,” Anohni told The Atlantic in response to the complicated history of blue-eyed soul. “And also say ‘thank you,’ because [those voices] saved my life.” She got together with producer Jimmy Hogarth—known for his work with British soul singers like Amy Winehouse and Duffy—and riffed on a decade’s worth of ideas while Hogarth played guitar. She drew on past memories: a meeting with iconic trans activist Marsha P. Johnson shortly before her death, conversations with Lou Reed before his, and her time as a co-founder of the Blacklips performance collective, whose recordings were organized into a compilation earlier this year. My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross—her first album with her band the Johnsons in 13 years—meets this precarious moment with a gritty record that provides a safe place to grieve nothing less than the destruction of the planet. It brings a voice so often described as “otherworldly” back down to Earth.
The backward-looking sound of My Back Was a Bridge sounds nothing like a Culture Club or Yaz record, though. Instead, it takes thematic and musical inspiration from the Marvin Gaye albums that inspired that subsequent generation of soul singers. If it’s daring to make a blue-eyed soul album in 2023, it’s even more provocative to attempt a modern-day What’s Going On within the trappings of blue-eyed soul. On this record, it’s not so much an attempt to provoke as an earnest exploration of Anohni’s vocal identity. These songs sound organic, often like they were recorded live in the studio with barely any reverb, vocal processing, or production flourishes. Anohni’s voice—and its origin story—is powerful enough to carry them alone.
The latest iteration of the Johnsons consists of notable session musicians, including Brian Eno associate Leo Abrahams and drummer Chris Vatalaro. With a band this tight, fleshed out with horns from William Basinski and strings from Rob Moose (whose arrangements most directly recall David Van De Pitte’s laconic lines on What’s Going On), Anohni has room to improvise, stretching her voice in new directions. “It Must Change” and the gospel-adjacent slow burner “Can’t” capture Anonhi’s first vocal takes and actively benefit from that lack of fussiness—there are even some joyous ad-libs on the latter’s outro, in between cries of “I don’t want you to be dead!” For someone so famously meticulous—she’s attuned to the tiniest of changes in her sound mixes—the immediacy is invigorating.
The soothing and somewhat uneasy “It Must Change” steadily builds to its final blow: “No one’s getting out of here/That’s why this is so sad.” That line sums up one of the album’s major themes—taking stock of what we’re losing by continuing to exploit the environment. “Go Ahead” essentially dares those in power to fully destroy the world, capped by a lemur-sampling guitar freakout that would make Lou Reed proud. Then Anohni pays him tribute directly on the next song, “Sliver of Ice,” recounting a discussion in which Reed described the novel sensation of chewing ice. Even the simple joys are at stake.
As on previous records, Anohni eventually turns the gaze upon herself; it’s not necessarily tender, but it’s more compassionate than the way she’d ask herself, “How did I become a virus?” On “It’s My Fault,” she sings, “It’s my fault, the way I broke the Earth,” but leaves room to acknowledge both what she’s losing and her own complicity in its loss: “I ache here, I take here.” Several songs lament the feeling of being too immersed in capitalism to figure out a better path: “Now everything’s gone to the floor/And all I ever want is more.” Even though it’s no one individual’s fault, it’s hard not to internalize the propaganda suggesting otherwise. There aren’t any answers, and for an artist whose most enduring revelations are declarative statements (“I wanna see them burn,” “I’ll grow back like a starfish”), it’s a heavy adjustment.
The internal shaming makes the outward rage of “Scapegoat” all the more effective. On a rare song that explicitly, specifically attacks transphobia, Anohni woozily exaggerates her vibrato and steps into the role of her oppressors. Her narrator flips surface-level sentiments of support—“It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from”—into the very reasons why someone is “so killable,” softening the blow with a few ironic refrains of “it’s not personal.” The triumphant guitar at the end just rubs it in.
How do we move forward from cynicism and devastation? Anohni has talked about the role of burnout in societal collapse, saying to the Atlantic: “All they care about doing is making sure that no one gets themselves together to have a broader conversation about the fact that malevolent figures are making decisions that [operate] like ushers of deaths into all of our communities.” There’s no space for mourning in a society hell-bent on overwork. If, as Anohni declares in the liner notes, “it’s time to feel what is really happening,” there’s not exactly time to feel it. That’s the use case for My Back Was a Bridge: It’s post-protest music, made stronger for refusing to endorse personal solutions to systemic problems.
The final two track titles, then, act as call and response: Why am I alive now? So you can be free. With this record, Anohni aims to be that bridge for others the way everyone from Boy George to Marsha P. Johnson inspired her. In maintaining the legacy of activist and musical icons, in acknowledging what has and hasn’t changed since Marvin Gaye sang about ecology 50 years ago, there’s space to mourn what’s already lost and a little room for possibility, too. The bridge does not necessarily lead to an idealistic ecofeminism utopia—for that, we may “need another world,” and we probably won’t get one. If the destination of that bridge is just a place to grieve, that’s good enough.


Following her Drive My Car soundtrack, the Japanese composer again links up with director Ryusuke Hamaguchi; this time, her ambiguous, atmospheric pieces are even more central to the narrative.

Evil Does Not Exist

Eiko Ishibashi and director Ryusuke Hamaguchi both revel in the unresolved. Ishibashi’s music has flitted between toy-box art punk, wide-open free jazz, zig-zagging classical piano, and dreamy industrialism, arriving now at a tense, quietly graceful form of musique concréte in which it’s never obvious what’s coming next. Hamaguchi, meanwhile, has steadily built a body of work delving into the quotidian unknown; the most mundane moments in his films hide the possibility for strange twists, vulnerable revelations, and open-hearted catharsis. Ishibashi’s soundtrack for Hamaguchi’s acclaimed 2021 film Drive My Car not only offered a sweet, sighing counterbalance to the film’s winding search for closure, but also delivered some of Ishibashi’s downright prettiest music yet. It was so successful that the two have teamed up once again, this time for a project of a very different nature.
Ishibashi wrote the Drive My Car score based on visuals sent to her by Hamaguchi, along with reference points (a theme song in the vein of Henry Mancini; music that sounds “like a landscape,” she told Variety). But Evil Does Not Exist took shape more holistically. The project began when Ishibashi asked Hamaguchi for imagery to accompany a new live performance she was working on, to be titled Gift. After a visit to her studio a few hours outside Tokyo—where, amid the tranquil surroundings, the two discussed the relationship between cities and nature—Hamaguchi began writing a story about a small rural community that becomes disturbed when a glamping company moves in and threatens to contaminate their water supply. Hamaguchi ended up shooting an entire film around the narrative, and in turn, Ishibashi fleshed out her music to match it.
Evil Does Not Exist isn’t a plot-heavy film; as the glamping resort plans how to set up shop in the village, Ishibashi’s music—the secret heart of the story—navigates the uneasy balance between the peacefully snow-covered countryside and the awkward cityfolk trying to interject themselves into its ecosystem. On “Hana V.2,” murky electronic tones bubble like pockets of air in pitch-black tar. Every time the track seems to settle, something interrupts, like lush washes of strings or a sharp piercing tone that returns again and again. “[Ishibashi] doesn't allow you to feel safe while you're listening to her music,” Hamaguchi recently told the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, describing how the composer’s music “seems to continuously develop without ever becoming conclusive.” This constant feeling of being on edge suits Hamaguchi’s own muted, close-to-the-chest rhythms.
Ishibashi deploys a number of subtle sounds to achieve this unsettling effect. On “Fether,” dissonant piano notes float over a shimmering metallic tone that refracts about itself like a spinning quarter. “Smoke” swells to a queasy din with moaning brass and pitter-pattering drums courtesy of regular collaborator Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, while the morbid “Deer Blood” follows a circular string melody that slowly tumbles into a dazed loop of mourning woodwinds. Ishibashi’s acoustic sounds convey this sense of the natural world pleading for its life: The title theme, which appears twice, opens the film on a long tracking shot gazing up at the sky through the trees, their skinny branches both powerful and fragile. Ishibashi, with the help of partner Jim O’Rourke on guitar, evokes the woods’ sorrow with a string theme that dips in and out between uncertainty and weeping beauty.
In Hamaguchi films, music often plays a critical, yet subservient role: When musical themes do emerge, they serve as emotional rudders to steer the long periods of silence that sit between. On screen, Evil Does Not Exist routinely cuts off the music mid-track. On record, though, Ishibashi’s disembodied chamber music is allowed to fully breathe, following her themes as far as the path will allow, even if they never quite reach clear conclusions. The cloudier nature of Ishibashi’s score leaves it feeling less like a standalone piece than the soft, jazzy pop of her Drive My Car soundtrack. But as a mirror to Hamaguchi’s tale of creeping environmental anxiety, Ishibashi’s ghostly music makes a rich companion.


Featuring members of Merchandise, the Ukiah Drag, and Uniform, these psych jams evoke a prog-inflected, Madchester-soaked record. They are unafraid to throw in any sound just to watch it whirl around.

Deep Marble Sunrise

Dig your way through the sprawling catalogs of Coca Leaf’s members (Uniform’s Ben Greenberg, ZZ Ramirez of post-psych rumblers the Ukiah Drag, and David Vassalotti and Carson Cox of Merchandise) looking to sniff out early signs of Deep Marble Sunrise’s wee-hours splatterdelica, and you’re bound to come up a little short. Even in their dubby, drum machine-assisted, “genres are not for us” days, Merchandise never sounded quite so out there; The Ukiah Drag’s more traditionally psychedelic work might be the closest analogue, and even that tends to work more in grays and blues than the full-spectrum explosion on display here. Deep Marble Sunrise is a prog-inflected, Madchester-soaked Spirograph of a record: expansive, exuberant, and unafraid to throw in any sound just to watch it swirl around.
Gliding in across a pool of sputtering rhythm and silverfish synths, “Riding Ice” sounds like the first minute of Miles Davis’ immortal “Shhh/Peaceful.” Soon enough, Ramirez grabs a mic, intoning in a kind of down-tuned half-rap, like a pirate broadcast of Frankie Knuckles’ immortal “Baby Wants to Ride” edging its way into KJAZ Fusion Fridays. It gets weirder from there. Across 37 distended minutes, Deep Marble Sunrise trips through Floydian inner-space, mid-aughts Baltimore art-squelch, heavy-lidded psych, spy movie soundtracks, you name it. The ease with which they move through these disparate styles, juxtaposing and reassembling as they go, is a marvel to listen to.
Deep Marble Sunrise is the product of some deep, purposeful ego dissolution. Carson Cox—who, as Merchandise’s frontman, certainly counts as Coca Leaf’s most public face—busies himself behind the drumkit and beyond the sliced-up Patti Smith sample rippling through the its opening track, Ramirez has the record’s only vocal turn. That no clear leader emerges here is certainly the goal: there’s a loose, improvisational feel to even the most multi-layered tracks here that mostly suggests four undoubtedly talented folks in a room, rolling tape and hoping for the best. All but one track here—ghostly piano interlude “Twilight Haze”—roll on past the six-minute mark, and the extra time allows them ample opportunity to dance their way out of their constrictions. Cox’s persistent rhythms, matched with Ramirez’s spherical low-end, help keep their fellow travelers from flying too afield; rather than shooting directly towards the bardo, Coca Leaf opt for controlled chaos, maintaining a free-floating feel without untethering themselves completely.
Late LP low-light “Marbled Sunset” takes a touch too long to achieve liftoff, while the aforementioned blip “Twilight Haze”—wedged between the icy “No Light Bleeds the Den” and the troubled groove of “Riding Ice”—never even gets off the ground. The extra oomph of their vocal work (sampled and otherwise) gives “Riding Ice” and “New Soft Dawn” makes one long for a few more voices stretched across the orbit. But considering the uncharted territory Coca Leaf survey, it’s only natural to hit a few bumps along the way. Not to underestimate any of these guys, but until now, it’s seemed pretty clear where their skills lie: Merchandise’s widescreen emotions, Ramirez’s subterranean scrim, Greenberg’s blown-out canon fodder. As it turns out, though, it’s this collective willingness to confound expectation, to not only dabble in some new sounds but to dive into them headlong, that sets off Deep Marble Sunrise. Surely this lot doesn’t know how to make freewheeling interplanetary molly-gargling party-prog—ah, but they do.


The punk trio’s unfussy production and precise vocal harmonies are a testament to their well-earned longevity.

The Devil You Know

When the Coathangers played their first show at an Atlanta house party in 2006, they could barely play their instruments. What began as an excuse to get rowdy with friends quickly evolved into a self-titled debut album with lawless, skull-smashing potency.  Thirteen years later, the Coathangers have developed their riotous, lo-fi early work into a more harmonious sound without losing their spiritual connection to the unprocessed simplicity and belligerence of their chaotic origin story. Sixth studio album The Devil You Know is a collection of glorious cassette-tape jams with unfussy production, tight melodies, and precise vocal harmonies. It fits together as easily as a toddler’s jigsaw puzzle.
On "Bimbo," a peppy guitar riff and drum loop bop along under the sweet-toned vocal stylings of guitarist Julia Kugel. The song then shifts into more jagged riffs to support drummer Stephanie Luke’s throaty garbles. The vocal interplay is a hallmark of the Coathangers’ sound, and their instincts when wielding it are near flawless.
A good Coathangers song proves that slick arrangements can facilitate blunt messages. Substance abuse has regularly punctuated their lyrics: "Adderall," a desperate ode to prescription-drug dependency from 2014’s Suck My Shirt, stands as one of their best songs. The new album’s “Step Back” offers a quieter but doomed depiction of the pain and helplessness of addiction. Over scratchy guitar chords and Meredith Franco’s bassline, Kugel reaches out to a loved one in crisis: “You’ve been gone too long,” she sings, “and I want you back.” Her fragile performance at first seems like a soothing anecdote—dissolution of the human spirit never sounded so desirable. Yet when Kugel hits the ethereal “ooooohs” on the song’s hook, her tenderness dissolves, as though the addict has finally slipped out of the arms of care.
The album’s melodic strengths can occasionally become a weakness, and at times a little more of that early rawness would have been appropriate. The creeping "Stranger Danger," for instance, could have used some extra muck on Franco’s bass to punctuate its horror-movie flavor. But this rare sense of caution can’t collapse a well-formed set that ratifies the band’s unflinching code of ethics. When asked to rank the group’s previous albums by Noisey last year, Kugel ranked them in reverse order. On The Devil You Know, their evolution continues.


The New York electronic musician fashions an evocative tribute to Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, conjuring the flux of gender and desire in shape-shifting sounds.

The Envoy

While any music might be speculative fiction—an answer to the question, “What if the world sounded like this?”—experimental electronic music twined itself to science fiction from the start. The first movie to have a completely electronic score was 1956’s Forbidden Planet, blazing a trail leading through Wendy Carlos’ A Clockwork Orange and Mica Levi’s Uncanny-Valley-of-the-Dolls experiments for Under the Skin. Gavilán Rayna Russom has been exploring strange new worlds under her own name and various aliases for more than 20 years, but The Envoy is a particularly concise dispatch. Her early records, like 2003’s El Monte (made with Delia Gonzalez) and Black Meteoric Star’s 2009 self-titled debut, sprawled as they gradually unfurled tangled kosmische and techno webs in single takes. As Russom became an occasional member of LCD Soundsystem, her own releases grew rougher and tougher, sounding closer in spirit to the Long Island Electrical Systems label and New York’s travelling poly-everything Unter parties.
The Envoy explores different territory: Ursula K. LeGuin’s outrageously fascinating 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, in which an ambassador from an interstellar equivalent of the UN explores a frozen planet populated by otherwise agender beings who periodically flux anatomically between male and female, depending on who strikes their fancy. Then they fuck. “As someone whose experience of gender has been complex, layered, and has tended to exist completely outside all social norms and categories,” Russom explained in a statement announcing the album and her gender transition, “I felt I was being seen.”
She’s put that vision into practice, developing nine lovely tracks in tribute to LeGuin’s masterpiece. Opener “Changelings in the Human Cradle” arrives in a brief bloom of scratch and haze, a rocket settling into a puff of ice dust. Closer “Winter” gradually crystalizes into angles of echoing piano chords, gathering stillness around itself. Between them, the album discovers unctuous sinews of industrial dub in “Strength Out of the Dark” and “I Bleed I Weep I Sweat”; on headphones, these tracks might tickle the ear, but when played loud in a room, they storm. “Place Inside the Blizzard,” whose title references an interzone in the book that is populated by suicides and ice-bladed grass, casts an unshakable chill. It’s like ASMR for feeling lonely. Melancholic respites like the Budd-like beauty “Center of Time” and the eerie title track are the sonic equivalent of those moments reading LeGuin’s book when you simply must close your eyes and let the brain unspool.
Much like in The Left Hand of Darkness, though, the true revelations come via making contact. In Russom’s case, it’s with a pair of celebrated ancestors. “Discipline of Presence” is a tense set piece for a full brass ensemble courtesy of Peter Zummo, a collaborator of Arthur Russell (who himself knew a thing or two about queer new sound worlds), who Russom met while touring and recording Russell’s Instrumentals. Zummo’s brass heralds something unknowable but certain as it rises through Russom’s fog; it’s imperial yet sort of shapeless. But “Kemmer” is the album’s true heart. Named for the temporal-sexual moment when LeGuin’s beings transform, the track is graced by Cosey Fanni Tutti’s intonation of Russom’s provocative texts. Cosey is that rarest of creatures, an underappreciated icon. Finding her and Russom together in this world is a great comfort to ours, in which at least 331 trans and gender-diverse people were murdered around the world between last fall and September, as waters rise and land burns. We need these partnerships, these connective visions, so that we might see a future for ourselves.


On its first album in over a decade, the UK prog band embraces a newly collaborative process, setting an atmosphere of creeping tension and volatility.

Closure / Continuation

The title of Porcupine Tree’s Closure/Continuation reads like a prompt from a choose-your-own-adventure novel that the authors haven’t finished writing yet. The UK prog-rock band’s eleventh studio album comes after more than a decade of silence, a hiatus during which founder and sole constant member Steven Wilson made five solo records. Between those increasingly non-proggy albums and a steady side gig remixing classic albums, Wilson seemed content. But the gravitational pull of Porcupine Tree has yanked him back into orbit—for the time being, at least. “I genuinely don’t know whether this is closure or the start of another continuing strand of the band’s career,” Wilson told The Guardian in March. On Closure/Continuation, this uncertainty arises through a rediscovered sense of musical volatility, a welcome rejoinder to 2009’s tedious, burnout-induced The Incident.
Wilson started Porcupine Tree in 1987 as something slightly more than a joke but considerably less than the wildly ambitious band it became. Hand-dubbed demo tapes with names like Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm and Love, Death & Mussolini were cheeky satires of England’s stuffy progressive rock tradition, but like Jethro Tull’s accidental classic Thick as a Brick, they also utilized its form. By 1996’s Signify, Porcupine Tree had added keyboardist Richard Barbieri, bassist Colin Edwin, and drummer Chris Maitland, and the presence of collaborators helped hone Wilson’s exploratory pieces into sharp rock songs. The band reshaped itself once again when Wilson fell in love with Opeth’s Still Life and struck up an alliance with their frontman, Mikael Åkerfeldt. The loose trilogy of 2002’s In Absentia, 2005’s Deadwing, and 2007’s Fear of a Blank Planet bears the mark of that friendship, augmenting the band’s tightly wound prog with crunching, metallic riffage. Future King Crimson drummer Gavin Harrison replaced Maitland behind the kit on those records, and his pummeling yet dexterous playing suited the heavier material well.
When Porcupine Tree departed the Royal Albert Hall stage on October 14, 2010, Wilson knew it would be their last show for an indefinite period. Barbieri and Harrison, who by then completed the band’s core trio, had not been informed. “You can’t help but feel bitter and hurt,” Barbieri told The Guardian, and their reunion on Closure/Continuation led to a reshaping of the band’s creative process. Despite recording their parts remotely, Wilson, Barbieri, and Harrison worked in closer collaboration than ever before. Of the seven songs on the standard edition of the album, only “Of the New Day” was penned solely by Wilson—a stark contrast to the writing credits of every other Porcupine Tree record. The three musicians frequently sound like they’re working through their decade of estrangement in real time, giving the songs a creeping, anxious tension.
The jarring bass riff that kicks off album opener “Harridan” sets the tone. Wilson plays three repetitions of the off-kilter line without accompaniment before Harrison’s skittering beat and Barbieri’s painterly washes of synth join the fray. When the vocals come in, Wilson defies any intimation of catchiness, singing in a meter that seems to live outside the song entirely: “Gold man bites down on a silver tongue/Takes a deep breath and blows the candle out.” The song eventually introduces a headbangable, Deadwing-style guitar riff, but it mostly exists to keep listener and band alike on their toes. The bridge, a beautifully sung counterpoint to the jagged verses, reappears at the end of the song, leaving both the melody and the narrative unresolved: “And what of us?/And what of me?/And what is left without you?”
This unsettled atmosphere spans the album. Even “Of the New Day,” a ballad roughly in the mold of earlier Porcupine Tree tracks like “Lazarus” and “My Ashes,” has a strangely paranoid sound, as the band switches between time signatures, never settling into a predictable groove. “Rats Return” and “Herd Culling” are cousins of “Harridan,” built on nervy bass lines that joust with impressionistic synths, while the Barbieri cowrite “Walk the Plank” is led by burbling electronics, sublimating Wilson’s guitar in favor of Eno-inspired soundscapes. These experiments don’t always reach the exhilarating heights of the band’s most beloved work, but they show a willingness to push forward into discomfort.
The best song is the towering, 10-minute closer, “Chimera’s Wreck.” (Three pretty-good bonus tracks are tacked onto the end of the limited-edition track list, the strongest of which is the Rush-like instrumental “Population Three.”) “Chimera’s Wreck” is also the song that most closely resembles the band’s mid-’00s peaks, with its labyrinthine structure, tricky rhythms, twitchy drumming, crushing riffs, and exaggerated loud-soft dynamics. It doesn’t feel like Porcupine Tree finding a new path forward so much as doubling down on their strengths. Wilson first walked away when he felt the band’s songwriting had become too formulaic. Closure/Continuation is admirable in its attempts to reject that formula, but in the end, it also proves just how good they were at it.


The Belarusian new wave band’s latest album is an austere gothic dream with no interest in pandering to the audience attracted by their improbable TikTok breakthrough.

Monument

It’s impossible to talk about Molchat Doma without mentioning TikTok. This year, the Belarusian new wave band’s shadowy, wriggling “Судно (Sudno),” from their 2018 album Этажи, unpredictably sprouted as a meme and racked up more than 150,000 associated TikToks. Some videos—outfit try-ons, armpit hair dye jobs—are presumably unrelated, but many involve images of Eastern Europeans vibing as Americans yearn for the same vibes in the comments section. The song’s principal association is of a post-Soviet lifestyle that’s vaguely anti-establishment, bare-bones yet filled with techno, a nebulous aesthetic aided by the fact that the majority of Americans don’t understand Russian.
Molchat Doma’s newest and third album Monument doesn’t pander to their broadened audience with English-language lyrics or “Судно” copies. Instead, it brings the ’80s gothic dream the band first envisioned on 2017’s understated С Крыш Наших Домов to an anxious, glossy head. The performances sound more confident, the music less muddy. Singer Egor Shkutko’s grumbly baritone is better controlled, packing the intensity of a Russian Ian Curtis. There’s even a bit of maximalist sparkle coming off “Дискотека / Discoteque,” where an eager flurry of keyboard accompanies Shkutko as he sings about dancing fervently at a house party. It’s a bright pop sentiment on a song that sounds like the Cure, or like-minded Russian new wave messengers Buerak, and its earnestness makes for a welcome break from the band’s usual chilliness.
But Molchat Doma does despondency well, even with song titles as amusingly explicit as “Ленинградский Блюз / Leningradskiy Blues,” a tinny, sleepy track detailing a doomed love that spans centuries. Shkutko often fixates on ghost stories like these, pleading with someone he has wronged to let him drown peacefully in “Утонуть / Utonut’,” or mythologizing a lover as he reconciles with his own mistakes on “Звезды / Zvezdy.” TikTok has equated Molchat Doma with a more debonair darkness; Monuments makes their solemn intensity clear.
As an American with a Bulgarian mom, I recognize the aesthetic appeal of Eastern Europe firsthand. Whenever I visit Bulgaria, I find myself Instagram-ing the crumbly cobblestone or chipped Cyrillic signs, and my baba looks at what I’m photographing and asks why. It has to do with contrast: America builds enough Apple Stores and gentrification condos to convince you that society isn’t crumbling, while Eastern Europe is mostly too poor to keep up pretenses. My fellow members of Gen Z, who’ve grown up surrounded by social media and its warring obsessions with authenticity and artifice, resent that. America is nothing if not inauthentic.
And yet, when it comes to international music, young Americans can’t help projecting. A notoriously monolingual crowd may have a hard time accepting Molchat Doma’s music as art with a particular historical and cultural context, not just a vehicle for a romanticized socialist fantasy—something that people on TikTok have already noticed and decried. It’s also hard to say why Molchat Doma is the object of American obsession, especially when Eastern Europe’s coldwave renaissance is filled with bands that sound a lot like them. Maybe it’s the way Shkutko sings like he’s reading his last will, or the grim precision of the drum machine. Molchat Doma’s music is so mystically self-possessed that it’s hard not to wish you were part of the magic, too.

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Shifting away from the gnawing, emo-inflected power-pop of their first two albums, the Melbourne trio ask: Can softness be as invigorating as fury?

Running With the Hurricane

Camp Cope know that it is all too easy to get swept away by a storm bigger than yourself. Since emerging from Melbourne’s punk scene in 2015, the trio—composed of vocalist and guitarist Georgia Maq, bassist Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich, and drummer Sarah Thompson—have vehemently opposed the misogyny that is all too common in the music industry. “The Opener,” a breakout single from 2018’s How to Socialise & Make Friends, transformed the band’s own experiences with sexism into a defiant feminist anthem: “It’s another man telling us to book a smaller venue… Now look how far we’ve come not listening to you!” In the four years since “The Opener,” some systems have evolved while others remain frustratingly intact. But Camp Cope have changed and their third album, Running With the Hurricane, has a secret to share: There’s stability to be found within the squall.
Camp Cope started working on Running With the Hurricane in 2019, but the onset of the pandemic forced them to pause. Over the next couple years, as COVID and environmental catastrophes ravaged the planet, the bandmates refocused their priorities; Maq returned to her prior career path, nursing, and helped vaccinate fellow Australians. When the band finally began recording in 2021, they embraced the twangy lightness of the pop-country tunes that Maq turned to for comfort. Songs like the title track or “Blue” could be lost mid-2000s Chicks cuts—Australian and Southern accents alike stretch vowels like taffy. Shifting away from the gnawing, emo-inflected power-pop of their first two albums, Camp Cope ask: Can softness be as invigorating as fury?
Running With the Hurricane answers this question with a collection of songs that focus on matters of the heart and mind. “We could have gotten even angrier and even harder,” Maq told NPR. “But we didn’t. We went the opposite way because we refused to let the world harden us.” Their emotional range has broadened with them. “Now I pull the sound around me and I sing myself to sleep, you’ll see how gentle I can be,” Maq sings on “The Mountain,” one of several songs about finding a newfound peace in vulnerability. But she doesn’t pretend that this growth completely frees her from uglier inclinations. There’s plenty of anxiety in the form of unanswered texts and casual sex, and on the jangly “Jealous,” Maq compares her own attention-seeking behavior and longing for affection to a love interest’s pet dog.
Running With the Hurricane is at its strongest when Camp Cope harness the swirling turmoil and ride it towards self-awareness. On the twangy “Blue,” Maq explores how the same loneliness that feels so isolating in one’s head can become a means of connection: “It’s all blue, that’s why I fit in with you.” The sentiment returns later on “The Mountain,” a gorgeous anthem of self-determination. “I climbed the mountain blind, I turned around to find a heart as complicated as mine,” Maq sings, perhaps pulling inspiration from the same Fleetwood Mac ballad the Chicks once did. The title track is one of the band’s best: Maq reckons with her self-doubt atop a galloping melody and layered harmonies that bring to mind the blooming self-realization of Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud. “There’s no other way to go,” she exuberantly proclaims. “The only way out is up.”
Just a few years ago, Camp Cope were determined to barrel through the hard parts; now, they’ve opened themselves to life’s chaos, ready to cruise alongside it. This shift from outward-looking protest to inward-facing resolve comes to a glorious climax on the album’s closer, “Sing Your Heart Out.” Featuring additional guitar from Courtney Barnett, it begins as a slow-building piano ballad in which Maq pledges herself as a vessel of love, in service to herself and others. “You are not your past, not your mistakes, not your money, not your pain, not the years you spent inside,” she proclaims, as her bandmates fall into place alongside her. “You can change and so can I.” As the song explodes into fireworks, they repeat the final verse like a mantra. It’s hard not to believe in its truth.
Correction: Courtney Barnett plays additional guitar on “Sing Your Heart Out”; she does not sing on the song.


Recorded straight to tape with a small group of close confidants, the Big Thief singer’s latest solo album is free-flowing and intuitive, reveling in the space between spontaneity and impermanence.

Bright Future

Two songs on Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future begin with the woosh of a tape machine settling into its correct speed. The players sometimes murmur among themselves as a song gets going or winds down; Lenker’s voice occasionally grows distant, as though she were turning away from the mic, then rises in volume as she leans forward again. At first blush, these audible moments of calibration signal a certain old-school authenticity. The Big Thief singer-songwriter cut her new album straight to tape, just like the last one, and it has the air of an unadulterated document of the music as it was performed in the studio.
Beneath the surface, these effects suggest a more complex relationship between the recording and the music, drawing attention to the artifice and happenstance of what we’re hearing. By demonstrating so explicitly that this is how the music sounded in this room, on this day, they’re also implying that it might have sounded quite different in another place, another time. The musicians play wispy outlines of folk rock, giving just as much attention to the negative spaces as the notes you actually hear. The aesthetic suits the material. Lenker’s songs find beauty in the attempt to give memory solid shape: to hold it in one’s palms like a wounded bird that sat still when the others flew away, and coax it with a sweet melody into sticking around a while longer. Bright Future is like an attempt to hold the memories of the songs themselves, to stop their wild wings from beating for a moment and get a good look before they vanish in the air.
For all the shaggy-dog presentation of her main band, Lenker often approaches her songs with disciplined attention to form and economy, but opener “Real House” is something different. Its chords float along without clear paths of tension and release; its lyrics are associative rather than linear. In the second verse, a surreal image stands in for feelings not yet addressed directly: “Stars shine like tears on the night’s face.” Eventually, the song reveals its subject as Lenker’s mother, and the fog of ambiguity around the preceding lyrics begins to clear. By the final lines, a devastating recounting of the first time Lenker saw her cry, we’ve moved wholly out of the spectral realm and into everyday heartbreak.
Lenker recorded Bright Future with accompaniment from Philip Weinrobe, her engineer and co-producer, as well as singer-songwriter and frequent Big Thief collaborator Mat Davidson, violinist and percussionist Josefin Runsteen, and alt-R&B auteur Nick Hakim. They did a lot of passing around instruments: The album’s basic palette is voice, guitar, piano, and violin, each of which is credited to at least two different performers at various points. (Runsteen and Lenker’s brother Noah also play occasional percussion.) The free-flowing and intuitive nature of the sessions is apparent in the recordings, which have the amiable looseness of first takes. You get the sense, sometimes, that they are figuring out a song’s ideal arrangement as they track it.
It is a testament to the sensitivity of Lenker’s collaborators that those arrangements so often mirror the concerns of her writing. “Vampire Empire,” a Big Thief fan favorite, gets an alternate rendition here, and its inclusion emphasizes the notion that these recordings are mere glimpses of particular moments in the lifespan of a song, not definitive final versions. Where “Real House” is airy and dreamlike, befitting the reverie of its lyrics, “Vampire Empire,” about passionate and destructive codependence, is furiously agitated. Most of the tracks on Bright Future give a sense of physical space between the players, but on this one they sound like they’re crowded around a single tinny microphone, sweating on each other as they sing and strum. It feels like the searing early home recordings of the Mountain Goats, except for Runsteen’s bouncy mallet percussion, which provides an odd but welcome undercurrent of whimsy.
Lenker is a prolific songwriter, and her solo albums can sometimes feel like release valves for a creative impulse that’s too big for one band. (Shortly before the release of Bright Future, she surprise-dropped i won’t let go of your hand, a more informal collection of songs whose proceeds benefit the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.) Earlier this year, she hosted a songwriting workshop that encouraged attendees to think in terms of craft rather than divine inspiration, with assignments like writing a story based on someone else’s photograph or copying the form of a John Prine song and filling in your own details. “Evol,” one of Bright Future’s best songs, seems like it could have arisen from one such exercise. It begins, in the grand tradition of Sonic Youth and Future, by recognizing that love backwards sounds kind of like evil. From there, Lenker finds other pairs, with varying degrees of exactness: Part becomes trap, teach becomes cheat.
The formal conceit might seem a little dopey if Lenker hadn’t followed it so doggedly to its ideal conclusion: “Evol,” of course, is about the power of language to deceive even as it claims to clarify, especially over matters of the heart. Lenker is so committed to the bit that you may not realize what she’s doing until you read the lyric sheet, which looks a bit like an e.e. Cummings poem. Here’s one particular doozy, with brackets added for how she pronounces the backwards words: “Speech spells hceeps [keeps]/You say for keeps/To keep me llehs [less]/A shell to speak through.” Intermittently, amid the mind-bending wordplay, she returns to a refrain that couldn’t be plainer: “You have my heart/I want it back.”
The wordplay of “Donut Seam” isn’t quite so sophisticated. The title is a pun, of course, as in “Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming/Before all the water disappears?” Lenker has woven references to ecological collapse into her songs before, but this may be the most overt. The music is wistful and simple, with Lenker strumming big open chords and her chorus of collaborators singing as one voice behind her. As the planet dies, so does a relationship. Lenker looks on at both fondly. At the beginning of the second verse, a new lover comes into her life like a dream come true. A few lines later, she’s on fire, with acid rain falling all around her. From the goofy title, and Lenker’s easygoing delivery, you might conclude that she’s not particularly bothered by this fate. Like the rest of Bright Future, “Donut Seam” shines with a certain acceptance: that everything—love, home, and the songs we write about them—will eventually pass into memory.


The São Paulo songwriter returns with a delicate, well-crafted collection that highlights his dynamic vocals and ear for melody and production.

Mil Coisas Invisíveis

Tim Bernardes aspires toward grand statements. In 2017, the Brazilian songwriter and multi-instrumentalist released his ambitious debut Recomeçar (Restart). Within its conceptual framework, Bernardes flexed his intellectual and compositional muscles, focusing on new beginnings and cycles of frustration in love and life. His stream of consciousness lyrical approach was matched by wandering orchestral excursions that strayed well beyond typical string-backed indie-folk songs. It was an impressive record, often sounding more like a work of musical theater than a traditional pop album, but its uncompromising structure at times stood in the way of Bernardes’ songcraft: There were many memorable moments but not necessarily memorable songs.
Since then, Bernardes has found subtler ways to blend his high aspirations with his innate gift as a songwriter. He has collaborated with the legendary Tropicália singer Gal Costa and had a guest spot on Fleet Foxes’ latest album, and his own music has sanded down his sprawling worldview to bare essentials: “Nascer, Viver, Morrer,” the first track from his latest album, Mil Coisas Invisíveis (A Thousand Invisible Things), incorporates lyrics about life, death, and rebirth with a straightforward structure and simple guitar-and-drums framework. At just under two minutes, the song seems more relaxed despite the intense emotion of Bernardes’ voice. Rather than surround himself with compositional flourishes, it opens the album with simplicity and a crystal clear vision.
The rest of Mil Coisas Invisíveis is just as concise and well-crafted. “Meus 26” ties together political themes of isolationism and globalism with personal reflections, balancing ghostlike orchestral swells with simple acoustic guitar playing and a solitary vocal take. Bernardes’ vocals drive the song through variations of intensity, shifting with ease between a whisper, a full-bodied chest voice, and soaring falsetto, the whole of the arrangement pulsating with him.
Bernardes is the primary instrumentalist on the album, playing guitar, synth, piano, percussion, and bass, as well as arranging the string and horn sections. Despite the abundance of textures, the production is delicate, precise, and meticulously arranged. Small bells and zills ring out to punctuate a change of pace; spectral string arrangements float in and out of the mix, commanding attention only when necessary. On “Esse Ar,” claves laced in reverb bounce in the distance while a quiet synth fades in and out, adding a psychedelic touch to his bossa-nova heritage. On “BB (Garupa de Moto Amarela),” Bernardes contrasts his whimsical guitar playing with violin, mimicking the joy and drama of the love story in its lyrics.
Bernardes’ greatest assistance comes from his influences, which he is not shy to own up to: “I believe in the Beatles,” he sings, believably, on the lush and monumental “Mistificar.” Other songs, such as “Falta,” sound a bit more relaxed, preferring the loungy, nylon-stringed tinge of ’60s and ’70s Brazilian fusion and vocal takes that sometimes recall a hoarse Jorge Ben. No matter where he’s drawing from, Bernardes is interested in disrupting that tradition, either through surreal orchestration or baroque harmony lines. Nodding to his country’s musical legacy as well as indie-folk music from the U.S., it’s a type of alt-bossa nova that sounds as much like Grizzly Bear as it does Caetano Veloso.
The centerpiece of Mil Coisas Invisíveis is “A Balada de Tim Bernardes,” an introspective epic in which Bernardes characterizes himself as half spirit-guide, half vulnerable-fool, who, in the face of the unknown, chooses to sing: “Why not?” Like the themes of Recomeçar, the song is about change and growth, but Bernardes isn’t being overly intellectual. Instead, his lyrics are untamed and instinctive, framed by a catchy chorus. In both the words and music, he beautifully captures the silliness of life and the magic therein.


The latest album from the masters of the K-pop formula is a slick, loosely thematic album about love and loss, with a stronger emphasis on rapping than ever before.

Love Yourself 轉 ‘Tear’

K-pop has long been poised for a breakthrough in the U.S., and the stars have aligned for the Korean boy band BTS. It doesn’t hurt that it is easier now than ever to be a K-pop fan on this side of the world, with the genre being tailor-made for our current algorithm-fed content chain. BTS has seized the opportunity, building a ravenous fanbase, not just at home and stateside but in South America and Europe as well. Bangtan Boys (their full name, Bangtan Sonyeondan, translates to “bulletproof boy scouts” in English), are designed for this moment, highly curated, aesthetically optimized for Western consumption.
BTS have been presented as the art-house alternative to K-pop’s manic energy: a modish, dilettantish, act whose music is a vehicle for larger artistic choices and statements. After debuting as a swag rap outfit, they evolved from rap-sung mashups to posh electro-pop pageantry. The concept for their 2016 album, Wings, was inspired by Hermann Hesse’s 1919 book Demian. The visuals for one of the best BTS songs, “Blood Sweat & Tears,” were picturesque stills framed in a pop-up museum featuring “The Fall of the Rebel Angels,” Michelangelo’s “Pietà,” and Nietzsche quotes etched in stone, which all produced dramatic fan readings of the video’s symbolism. The members co-write and co-produce their songs, some of which delve into mental wellness and social responsibility, a process that has led many to dub their songs more “personal,” a word sometimes used as a dog whistle for music appealing to be taken more seriously. Their tactics have been emulated by boy bands who have followed, but in many ways, BTS are simply the K-pop model maximized for efficiency.
Love Yourself: 轉 ‘Tear’, which follows the 2017 mini album Love Yourself: ‘Her’ and the Japanese full-length Face Yourself released earlier this year, is a kaleidoscopic mark of that efficiency, observing the finely tuned formula BTS have been perfecting since 2015. ‘Tear’, like ‘Her’, is a concept album of sorts. Roughly half the songs adhere to the album’s subhead. If ‘Her’ was an assortment of heart-professing love songs, then ‘Tear’ is the inverse. It deals primarily, though not exclusively, with the cycle of grief that lingers through a separation. But all of the songs generally find their way back around to self-love at some point. The album’s opener, “Intro: Singularity,” provides its thesis. “Even in my momentary dreams/The illusions that torture me are still the same,” V sings. “Did I lose myself, or did I gain you?”
Written and arranged with longtime producer and frequent collaborator Pdogg and Big Hit label CEO Hitman Bang along with a team of collaborators (Steve Aoki, MNEK, Chainsmokers co-producer DJ Swivel), ‘Tear’ aims for cohesion and produces fun, prismatic songs in the process. There is some level of thematic consistency on ‘Tear’ with at least a semblance of an emotional arc being teased out across the 11 tracks: navigating a dream world and the real one in search of a personal paradise (which at times reads like an analog for being a pop star, especially on “Airplane Pt. 2”), losing love and facing the requisite anxieties and loneliness. These all come to a head on the foreboding lead single “Fake Love,” characterized in full by a lyric that roughly translates to: “I grew a flower that couldn’t bloom/In a dream that can’t come true.”
K-pop is often experimental in form and function, which produces full-lengths that can be spasmodic in tone and quality. BTS aren’t immune to this, but the rappers—RM (or Rap Monster), J-Hope, and Suga—anchor the group, not only keeping it moored to a unified aesthetic amid constant stylistic shifts but dictating much of what happens in the music. On the bruising, all-rap closer “Outro: Tear,” the three take turns ripping through the track with punchy cadences, at times suddenly swapping places. The group’s vocalists trade off short, sweet passages that revolve around and often pivot off of rapped verses. Where rap verses are often stopgaps for other K-pop groups, obligatory aspects of pop roleplaying, they are essential to structure and composition here. Whispered, breathy raps slingshot into the supple hook on the flute-powered “134340.” On “Love Maze,” RM balances elastic syllabics with singsong musings while Suga dashes into a tightly twisting flow. Between them, the other members let loose mellow, honeyed coos. The sequencing of the vocal routines is as carefully synchronized as the choreography in their videos.
‘Tear’ isn’t as ambitious or stunning or tragic as Wings, which gave each of the seven members a solo turn ranging from lounge-ready piano balladry and symphonic, single-spotlight melodrama to brooding alt-rap with “Blood Sweat & Tears” as its ideological and aesthetic centerpiece. But there are moments here when BTS seem more poised and more in sync than ever. The Aoki-produced “The Truth Untold” is an epic misdirection; instead of leaning into their EDM-flavored pop or the blitzing trap of Aoki’s “Mic Drop” remix, they opt for a seamless piano serenade wherein the group’s four singers weave in and out of each stanza. “Paradise” is largely propelled by graceful exchanges from Jungkook, V, Jin, and Jimin, who surface and retreat gently. Across Love Yourself: 轉 ‘Tear’, BTS are at their best when they feel for and support one another.


Baltimore melodic hardcore band Angel Du$t describe themselves as a mix of the Bad Brains and the Lemonheads, and their latest mixes mash notes with double-time tempos.

Rock the Fuck on Forever

It’s hard to say whether form or function came first in hardcore, but it’s one hell of an equal partnership—music that effectively conveys the feeling of being extremely intense about something, for about as long as one can feel comfortable being that extremely intense. And yet, its brevity also makes it an interesting filter for pop.  With only two minutes to spare at most, the verses have to be cut out or ignored, the chorus just gets yelled a few times and then you move onto the next one. Isn’t that how most people choose to remember pop songs anyway? Angel Du$t isn’t the first band to come up with this idea, but whereas most bands of this sort come off like hardcore acts dabbling in pop, Rock the Fuck on Forever is the exact opposite.
Hell, this isn’t the first time they tried either, though 2014’s *A.D. *seems like an obvious dry run in retrospect. At the time, Angel Du$t were a relatively melodic hardcore band, but they didn’t sound ready to embrace it as their definitive aspect. Fortunately, they were emboldened by its positive underground reception. In an interview from last year, the incredibly well-named Justice Tripp said,  “I think in 2015, you can do whatever you want and most hardcore kids will at least try it out.” His native Baltimore is having a bit of a moment right due to a couple of hardcore bands that go far outside of the genre’s strictures. In addition to Angel Du$t, Praise skews emo in a way similar to Title Fight, and the rapidly ascendant Turnstile could pass for an aggro 311 or unwoke Rage Against the Machine at times. Angel Du$t itself contains members of Turnstile and fist-swinging traditionalists Trapped Under Ice.
Angel Du$t still love themselves some hardcore bluster—“Rectify” sounds awful cheerful about the ass-kicking you've got coming your way, Tripp’s pretty sure everyone’s kinda full of shit (“Somebody Else”) and life is kinda pointless (“Headstone”). It’s kind of a posture, though: Tripp sings with a chest-puffing huff and enunciates so every lyric is completely understandable. It’s musclebound and also lovably cartoonish, like being menaced by Zangief from Street Fighter or something*.*
The power of *Rock the Fuck on Forever *actually lies in its love songs. The band describes themselves as a cross between the Lemonheads and Bad Brains, essentially meaning they play goofy pop songs about how much they like girls and/or how much they wish a girl would like them back at extremely fast tempos. Will Yip’s production tends to be divisive in punk circles, but there’s no denying his ability to make bands in this realm sound like they could’ve snuck into a 1995 alt-rock station if things broke right; the stuttering vocals from  “Ready 2 Receive U” and “Upside Down” imagine if Cloud Nothings followed their pop-punk muse and worked with Rob Cavallo rather than Steve Albini. In other words, they’re about halfway between *Pinkerton *and Smash.
It’s Angel Du$t’s best trick, but it’s not their only one—there’s nods at surf-rock (“Bad Thing”), rap-metal non-sequitur (“Toxic Boombox”), and classic hardcore hxc call-and-response (“Hurt You Bad”). There’s even an instrumental! *Rock the Fuck on Forever *sees itself as a real-deal album, lending a degree of seriousness to Angel Du$t that would otherwise be absent. Whether it’s necessary is a different issue—even at 20 minutes or so, they've stretched as much as they need to and it’d almost certainly be stronger if it were three minutes shorter rather than three minutes longer.
As much as *Rock the Fuck on Forever *has the *sound *of a crossover, there’s never the sense that the band is playing the angles and hoping to score a ticket out of punk rock. You can’t say a band called Angel Du$t making a record called *Rock the Fuck on Forever *isn’t self aware, but to get a sense of their work ethic, they’ll be playing nine straight nights while traversing Tijuana to Seattle and back to Los Angeles for the purist Sound and Fury Festival. It’s loud, it’s fast and it kicks ass: despite the jokes and mash notes, this *is *hardcore.


Dean Blunt’s latest semi-unofficial side project is his least inscrutable, featuring 20 minutes of low-key, free-flowing vignettes made largely with guitars, keys, and samples.

Hotep

An interview with Dean Blunt is a rare enough opportunity that you can hardly read one without the fact first being pointed out. If he’s not called “elusive” or “press-shy,” he’s a “prankster,” “piss-taker,” or “provocateur.” As he said in one such piece early last year, “British [people] hate feeling like they have egg on their faces… They’re quick to sew a jester’s hat.” All of which is to say that the Londoner’s public persona has long preceded him. This is no doubt because of the many, largely unanswered questions raised by Hype Williams, Blunt’s defunct avant-pop duo with Inga Copeland, and his striking, inimitable solo work in music and art. And because, well, who isn’t intrigued by a good riddle?
Two albums released under the stage name Dean Blunt, 2013’s The Redeemer and 2014’s Black Metal, teased anyone hoping to catch a glimpse behind the curtain. They sounded sensitive and confessional in a way that Hype Williams hadn’t, and the music was far more clear-headed, sometimes even catchy. But to anyone hearing the music as a recluse letting his guard down and baring his soul, Blunt would have likely said they’re missing the point. Outsiders may see him as a fascinating figure—a mercurial, enigmatic, capital-A Artist—but it takes a true narcissist to see yourself that way. Blunt soon began backstepping. He focused on releasing knotty, stream-of-consciousness mixtapes through anonymous YouTube accounts and obscure websites. By the time of his next official album in 2016, Babyfather’s BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow, Dean Blunt the performer was obfuscated by unknown aliases, vocal effects, and literal smoke. Now, under the name Blue Iverson, his ego has conceded the spotlight entirely.
Released as a free stream and download, like Blunt’s many online mixtapes, Hotep is 20 minutes of low-key, free-flowing vignettes made largely with guitars, keys, and samples. Most songs are instrumental, and the few vocals that appear are female, presumably from Jenna of “Jenna’s Interlude.” Though the reserved grooves running through Hotep aren’t completely alien to Blunt’s catalog, they are more cohesive and traditional than anything else he’s done. It wouldn’t be a Blunt record without a couple unconventional twists, but this is largely “rhythm and blues” boiled down to its original definition: jazzy, soulful blues music with a heavy beat.
Blunt has plenty to say about R&B and its fall in popular culture beneath the “hyper-masculinity” of hip-hop, but you won’t hear about it on Hotep. The hope, it would seem, is that you’ll feel it. The absence of an overt male presence feels intentional; the disjointed femininity of “Brown Grrrl” feels consciously unsettling. In the stunning closer, “Fake Loathe,” Jenna breaks out over the music’s silky bounce, singing, “Oh, you don’t know what you do to me.” Her words feel more deeply pained than lovelorn. Lauryn Hill’s image—taken from her career-defining album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill—adorns the cover like a religious icon. Indeed, she serves as Blunt’s inspirational and moral North Star on Hotep, an album that challenges male supremacy with whispers and negative space.
Hotep’s quiet querying is most effective, however, because Blunt has given his would-be codebreakers a record that doesn’t resemble a question mark. There’s nothing to decipher in “Coy Boy”’s bluesy guitar solo, and a song as warm and groovy as “Soulseek” couldn’t be more immediately accessible. The rickety, good-times funk of “Hush Money” wants only to join whatever party it can, even if its brief boogie will leave dancers asking why the music stopped so soon. But first, Blunt seems to say, more important answers are needed in the everyday world, where everyday issues must be interrogated by everyday people. “We’ve got to question everything we’ve been told about us being black,” he explained to a panel late last year. “There’s a lot of homophobia, there’s a lot of dominance in it… Within the black movement there’s a lot of dominance over women...That has to be addressed first.” In the meantime, Blunt’s music can speak for itself.


His name is short for “The International Billionaire’s Secret Love Child,” and his ambient pieces are weightless as a sigh, splotchy as a bruise, both cozy and unsettling.

TIBSLC: Delusive Tongue Shifts - Situation Based Compositions

In just 10 releases over the past four years, Manchester’s Sferic label has established a remarkably consistent identity—one defined, ironically, by the near absence of identifying features. On records from Space Afrika, Jake Muir, and Perila, among others, Sferic has developed an amorphous take on ambient, gently but firmly tugging the music free of any vestigial new-age connotations and pushing it into a nebulous space where certainties dissolve. The label’s releases train a soft-focus lens on hushed synthesizers, spongy textures, and indistinct field recordings, all obscured beneath layers of reverb and hiss. The resulting forms resemble collections of objects buried beneath fresh snowfall, their outlines barely visible, their origins no longer clear. The longer you listen to any given Sferic release, the less apparent it becomes which parts were played, or programmed, and which are pure happenstance. The label’s releases tend to suggest a similar line of inquiry: How pliable are the seams between order and disorder, or intention and chance?
Leipzig’s TIBSLC makes a natural fit for Sferic. Their name is short for “The International Billionaire’s Secret Love Child,” the kind of moniker you might expect to find attached to a third-rate ska-punk band, or perhaps a Grand Royal signing that never came close to recouping its advance. But their music over the last few years, mostly self-released, sounds nothing like the associations the alias might evoke. It is a mottled expanse of shimmer and hum: weightless as a sigh, splotchy as a bruise, cozy and unsettling in equal measure.
Delusive Tongue Shifts – Situation Based Compositions, TIBSLC’s first album for Sferic, begins and ends with the sound of trickling water, like snowmelt rushing across mountain rocks. It is an effective framing device: Between these two liquid bookends, the album plunges us into a swirling expanse of constant motion and mutation. The opening “Soft Afternoon Pressure” introduces the sounds and techniques that will recur throughout the album. Muted synthesizer chords roll in waves, joining in a kind of tidal call and response. Tiny clicking sounds evoke pebbles in the surf. Indistinct voices carry on a private conversation, like a radio heard through a neighbor’s walls. As the track drones on, there is a gradual, almost imperceptible intensification reminiscent of an orchestra tuning up, except in place of instruments, there is only running water, wind through dry grass, cicadas, and electrical hum.
Pretty much every track seems to have been made with the same basic tools. The record is awash in indistinct tone clusters, out-of-sync pulses, and fizzy crackling sounds—an abundance of downy chaos. “Extended Stay of Blue Sky” begins with what might be vinyl crackle; “Nightmode” is bathed in a phosphorescent glow. Even at its most peaceful, though, there is a sense of irreconcilable tension at the heart of the music. TIBSLC’s chords rarely resolve neatly; it is difficult even to parse their precise makeup, given the bright overtones that bristle skyward, blurring the intervals between notes. Everything is shrouded in a kind of arctic glare, like a halo around the sun on a foggy day.
It is not necessarily difficult to create ambient music that tumbles, lava-lamp-style, through a succession of ever-changing cotton-candy hues. Every week, it seems, there’s a new wellness app promising an AI-generated soundtrack designed not only to erase its creator’s fingerprints but to make you forget that you are listening to music at all. None of those propositions, frankly, have ever sounded terribly appealing. What draws me back to TIBSLC’s music is the sense that there’s something more there, something just beyond my perception. The buried voices and omnipresent insect buzz lend the impression that there are hidden messages coded into the din; the drone suggests a surfeit of information that resists deciphering.
Listen deeply enough into the murk, and some of TIBSLC’s most outlandish sounds—the chatter of aviary gossip, the whale song crossed with whizzing bottle rockets—begin to reveal their secrets. There are rhythms encrypted into almost every level of the music: galumphing sub-bass pulses, filters that open and close like a bellows, the accelerating clatter of a dropped quarter coming to rest. Innumerable fluttering pulses are in play at any given moment, speeding and slowing, trilling and throbbing, lending movement and purpose to seemingly static sounds. No matter how freely the music seems to drift, there is little doubt that there is a guiding hand behind it; what else could account for this uncanny space where the natural and the synthetic blend so seamlessly and unpredictably? There are entire worlds to be explored in TIBSLC’s mysterious tangle of textures and sensations, and they teem with life.

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On his fifth Tobacco album, Thomas Fec doubles down on both the most alluring and unsettling aspects of the project.

Hot Wet & Sassy

Since introducing his Tobacco alias in 2008 in the shadow of his more cosmically inclined electro-psych act, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Thomas Fec has been engaged in a prolonged game of, as a track from his debut record put it, “Gross Majick,” reveling in the tension between technical precision and human deviancy. Like his signature melting logo, Tobacco’s synth-funk pastiches are positively dripping with blood, sweat, spit, and other bodily fluids; even when you can’t tell what his corroded voice is saying half the time, his lecherous delivery—sounding like some heavy-breathing prank caller—broadcasts his intentions loud and clear. And on his fifth Tobacco album, Fec doubles down on both the most alluring and unsettling aspects of the project.
Hot, Wet, & Sassy arrives four years after the previous Tobacco album, Sweatbox Dynasty, though Fec’s gear settings were seemingly left untouched in the interim. He continues to build tracks from his toolkit of gritty beats, fuzz-slathered synths, and chiming glockenspiel-like refrains that periodically cut through the crud. But if Tobacco’s past records bore the blurry patina of a VHS cassette that’s been languishing for decades in a milkcrate, Hot, Wet, & Sassy is more like a first-gen DVD, bringing a sharper focus to his melodies while rendering his synth grotesqueries in a more horrifying fidelity. And if Fec’s voice sounds as haunted and horny as ever, Hot, Wet, & Sassy ultimately expands Tobacco’s emotional vocabulary from creepy all the way to weepy.
The opening “Centaur Skin” serves as the showroom model for the reformulated Tobacco. Though its Moroderized Knight Rider pulse reaffirms Fec’s love for ’80s flash’n’trash, Fec issues his ominous admissions—“I’m a bad friend/I got bad ideas/But always sincere”—with a sympathy-for-the-devil pathos. Throughout Hot, Wet, & Sassy, Fec takes delight in toying with your perception, treating each song as a Rorschach test to diagnose your state of mind: “Headless to Headless” alternates between a chainsawed buzz and Kraftwerkian shimmer on a verse-by-verse basis, until you’re unsure of whether its climactic mantra—“It’s going to feel like shit forever!”—is meant to sound like resignation or celebration. At his most monstrous—like on “Stabbed by a Knight”—Fec lets the song’s teeth-grinding metallic riff play call-and-response with disarming R&B breaks and twinkling keyboard frippery, instantly transforming the album’s scariest song into its most playful.
Hot Wet & Sassy is a less intriguing proposition when its enigmatic qualities give way to campy pranksterism and blown-out sonics—like when Fec invites Trent Reznor in for a cameo and renders him as musical mulch to throw into the cauldron. Their collaboration, “Babysitter,” is less a song than a two-minute stutter-funk trailer for some straight-to-video slasher flick, with Fec repeating the line “I’m the new babysitter” as if the flesh was melting off his face, while Reznor hides behind the sort of obfuscating falsetto he’s rarely indulged in since “Heresy.” If anything, Reznor’s presence is more strongly felt on a spiritual level on tracks like “Motherfuckers 64,” which more closely aligns Tobacco’s M.O. with the original Nine Inch Nails mission of making ’80s Depeche Mode sound more demonic. But Fec also spends a great deal of Hot, Wet, & Sassy trying to make his proverbial hate machine look prettier, by exploring how his discomfiting voice adapts to more serene surroundings.
Alas, the results can leave him sounding awkwardly exposed: on “ASS-TO-TRUTH” and “Perfect Shadow,” the contrast between Fec’s mutant vocals and the songs’ slow-jam vibes can leave him looking like a guy who shows up for work November 1st still dressed in his Halloween costume. However, on “Jinmenken,” his breathy delivery fogs up the windows on an intimate ballad, turning the ghostly qualities of his voice into an effective complement to lyrics that ruminate over post-breakup absence and unanswered phone calls. And coming out of the ambient interstitial “Poisonous Horses,” the gently glitching “Mythemim” emerges as Hot, Wet, & Sassy’s greatest revelation, the point where Fec keeps his subversive tendencies in check long enough to fully surrender to beauty. Fec inhabits the song as a benevolent apparition, coasting atop its analog synth clusters and pinballing breakbeats into the sunset. But the song’s blur yields the album’s most profound moment of clarity—because even if you can’t make out what Fec is saying, you can certainly see his smile.

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On this Thrill Jockey LP, the Detroit duo continue their transformation from cyborg post-punk to cheerleader pogo goth.

Gimme Trouble

A funny thing happened the last time I saw Adult. Someone in the crowd requested their 2001 electro favorite "Hand to Phone", which wasn't so strange. Nicola Kuperus said she was sick to death of singing that song, which wasn't so unusual either. But then-- then she did start singing it, in an eye-rolling parody of her old robot monotone: hand to phone, hand to phone, blah blah blah.
I can't think of much better shorthand for the group's career arc-- abandoning those pitch-perfect light-speed electronics and diving off into a world of potentially embarrassing basement trainwrecks. Kuperus traded icy drone for the kind of witchy yelping not much heard since Bauhaus's prime. Adam Lee Miller traded clean-line synth flash for nasty bass-guitar buzz. They added a guitar player; they spazzed out. And as much as each new release came out like a total mess, there was something in each of them that's totally fascinating, as if each of those risky sounds-- from cyborg post-punk to cheerleader pogo goth-- was one wobbly, perilous step in the direction of something much greater. The only question: when-- or whether-- they'd ever break past the wobbles and come out with whatever that great thing was.
Is that thing Gimme Trouble? Not quite-- but this is a whole lot closer than anything we've heard so far. For one thing, there's the sound, which has perked up beautifully. Drum machine pump, bass blurt, synth clatter, guitar screech-- they all mesh clean and shiny here, and on some tracks they take on a slanty, minimalist bounce that practically breaks a smile. "Bad Idea" kicks off sounding like early Devo, something from an era where weirdoid punk and synthesizers got along naturally. The go-go drum machine and one-note guitar on "Still Waiting" leave the whole thing feeling vaguely like an early B-52's rave-up. Half the rest sounds like X-Ray Spex or Siouxsie and the Banshees-- there is vintage new wave rawness and goth-inflected bounce all over this thing, and it manages to leave this band in fresh-sounding territory that's somehow miles away from most everything today's "new wave revivalists" and/or "electro-punks" have even thought about trying. Best of all: no mess. No little time-trials, or side-notes, or half-formed clatters-- just 12 songs that, while somewhat lacking in super-blazing stand-outs, present a giant step up in coherence.
That's good news: It doesn't feel so "confrontational" anymore, does it? With their last full-length, Anxiety Always, it sounded like they were challenging us, deliberately nag-nag-nagging us with the shriekiest, most paranoid rumble they could muster. That was fun, in its way, and it's certainly not as if they've dropped that agenda. But the Adult. on this record can be "fun" in a much more pleasant, straightforward way-- the same jump-around-and-screech-along way their early electro singles could be. The only thing that still worries me is the memory of them on stage, with Kuperus posing and sneering and genuinely trying to act out the cretinous-vampire schtick the band's been working its way through. Are we going to have to get Devo and Fred Schneider to come wave the landing lights and guide them to the sweet spot? This isn't scary tough-guy muscle, guys-- it's spazzed-out pogo geek-punk, and it's almost nearly there. Cover "Rock Lobster" if you have to.


The trio’s debut album shifts casually between soulful rap, textured noise, and pensive folk with grace and sometimes too much distance.

This Time I’ll Be Of Use

Indianapolis rappers Sirius Blvck and Oreo Jones, and producer David Moose Adamson have been orbiting each other for years. Before uniting as 81355 (pronounced “bless”) on Justin Vernon and the Dessner brother’s 37d03d label, the group members were in regular contact through features, shows, and the general closeness of the Naptown music community. Blvck and Jones, in fact, amassed enough recordings to release a joint album, unconcerned., at the tail end of 2020. This shared history is the foundation of This Time I’ll Be of Use, a record that brims with easy fusion and harmony.
The album coheres immediately. 81355 is in constant motion, shifting casually between soulful rap, textured noise, and pensive folk with grace. A single and opening track, “Capstone” builds slowly, accumulating ominous images and airy melodies until the song is an ice sheet of voices and sounds. The group’s arrangements prioritize configuration, avoiding sharp pivots and dissonance in service of steady accretion. Compared to other alt-rap acts like Injury Reserve and Young Fathers, they have no interest in provocation or spectacle, a composure that gives their medleys a quiet sense of confidence but also makes the record feel anonymous and distant.

The trio recorded the album during the pandemic, a backdrop they unsuccessfully try to turn into surtext in their music. There are constant mentions of revolt, dread, and remorse, but they often value mood over perspective. “I never sleep a wink because I think about decades that happened long ago,” Jones says on “The Void,” one of many clumsy lines that nod to the past without engaging with it. (Can one think about a decade?) Throughout the record, Jones makes land acknowledgments, declaring solidarity with the Cherokee, the Potowatomi, and Palestinians, but the shoutouts feel ritualistic, rooted in habit rather than resolve.

Blvck, whose writing is often diaristic, makes frequent mention of fire and hauntings, but he also feels removed from his muses. His best line comes early in the record, on “Capstones.” “Generational curses I still can’t undo/Just taught my little girl to tie her shoes/Now she running to,” he raps, turning a coming-of-age moment into a tragic loss of innocence. Otherwise, his verses are drained of sensation, coming across as sights instead of scenes. Elsewhere, Blvck and Jones are agile, compelling rappers, bursting with energy and specificity; but here, they’re lethargic, weighed down by the magnitude of the concepts they’re trying to wrap their heads around.

81355’s soul-searching works best when the group embraces its view from nowhere, refining their collective dread into a cosmic quest. “Where I go it all depends/I would like to call you friend/Lean you back into my eyes/Maybe I could see you then,” Adamson sings on “Through the Portal,” a shapeshifting track that turns restlessness into shared drive. Though it appears only in flashes on This Time I’ll Be of Use, that sense of dissolution as a new beginning rather than climax or defeat is the group’s clearest strength. They don’t yet have a combined vision, but in their mutual commitment to ego-death, there are signs of life.

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The twenty-two tracks on this definitive best-of compilation capture the slippery, pliant, ecstatic sound that defined Larry Levan as a producer, DJ and high priest for a club night deemed "Saturday Mass" by its attendees.

Genius of Time

It's the norm now, but at the birth of modern dance music in the 1970s, DJs, producers and remixers were rarely the same person. As influential as his Loft parties were, you'd be hard-pressed to find a record bearing the credit of "a David Mancuso production." And while Tom Moulton invented the remix (as well as the 12" single), outside of the Sandpiper tapes, his legacy wasn't made behind the decks. So while Lawrence Philpot was well on his way to becoming Larry Levan, the greatest DJ of all time (at the helm of the most revered club of all time, the Paradise Garage), as Tim Lawrence put it in Love Saves the Day, "even at the early stage of his remixing career the Garage DJ had created such an important canon that even when he wasn't spinning it was more than likely that somewhere else he was being spun."
That spinning/ spun dichotomy is part of what defines Levan and his lasting legacy as well as what makes boiling down his genius difficult. Try to put Levan into a handy package and it becomes tricky. Do you capture his DJ sets in situ? Do you focus entirely on the work rendered for a single disco label, like Salsoul or West End? Or do you draw from a back catalog big enough to contain Levan's remixes as well as what he himself would have spun? The strength of Universal's two-disc Genius of Time lies in the latter option, now having the biggest catalog to choose from, be it Island, Motown A&M and more.
The prolific Levan had over 250 remix credits to his name, so Genius of Time has its work cut out cherrypicking them and forming a coherent set. And in drawing on Universal's holdings, it still means not licensing some stone Levan-touched classics: Instant Funk's "I Got My Mind Made Up," Skyy's "First Time Around," Taana Gardener's "Work That Body" and Inner Life's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," to name just a few. The disco sound of the late '70s is eschewed to instead focus on the sinewy, synth-laced pop of the early '80s. Nevertheless, its twenty-two tracks capture the slippery, pliant, ecstatic sound that defined Levan as a producer, DJ and high priest for a club night deemed "Saturday Mass" by its attendees.
The opener "Life is Something Special," credited to NYC Peech Boys, shows Levan's mastery behind the boards. The set is bookended by this track as well as the most seductive song about growing impatient ever set to tape ("Don't Make Me Wait"). "Special" extends for a slow-rolling nine minutes, and it's so expansive one could parallel park in its stereo field. The song is little more than a stately piano line, a synth that spumes like a squeezed juicebox, a rock guitar solo, handclaps so echo-y they seem to come down from heaven and the group harmonizing the title. With so few moving parts, one might imagine it grows tedious, but Levan manipulates everything so that each sound strides towards you and then veers away, cruising you yet remaining ever elusive. As it continues to unfold, the song sublimates so as to be a mantra of uplift. In hindsight of the AIDS epidemic that would soon ravage the Garage's audience and owner (not to mention Keith Haring, who designed the Peech Boys's album cover), decades later it sounds more and more like a song of resistance and resilience in the face of impending death.
As a gay African-American making his dancefloors writhe as one, Levan's sets often highlighted R&B divas, so it makes sense that his production skills were at their finest when he partnered with female singers. Esther Williams's "I'll Be Your Pleasure" is the most classic disco of the set and Levan adds a lavish swirl of strings and percussion to her husky voice. With a rollicking piano, rattling tambourine and tricky-metered hiccup right at the song's chorus, he teases out the gospel, R&B, soul and jazz roots of Dee Dee Bridgewater's voice on "Bad For Me." For Syreeta, the onetime wife of Stevie Wonder, "Can't Shake Your Love" shows Levan at his spry best, adding bass squelches, sax squeals, rolling piano and synth lines that fidget like five year-olds on a church pew.
Levan's greatest muse, though, was Gwen Guthrie, and the mini-LP Padlock epitomized the sound of the Garage. Smooth, subtle, never one to over-sentimentalize her lines, Guthrie found the perfect foil in Levan, who remixed the tapes of Guthrie at Compass Point (already boasting a formidable band in Sly & Robbie, Wally Badarou and Steve Stanley) to sublime effect. The four tracks presented here are bright and shadowy, psychedelic yet body-moving, seductive and ebullient, cool and sultry. You'll never regard a PB&J sandwich the same way after hearing Gwen Guthrie purr: "Spread yourself over me like peanut butter." It's one of the finest amalgams of singer and producer of that decade, equivocal to Jellybean with Madonna or Janet with Jam & Lewis.
It was short-lived however, and as the decade wore on, the closing of the Paradise Garage and the high human cost of AIDS began to take a toll on Levan's psyche and work (along with his ravenous heroin habit). But as Genius of Time shows a new generation of dance fans, Levan was a singular talent. As Moulton put it: "He had the feel. He would always sacrifice the technical if it meant that he could have the feel, and that's the most important thing in music." You can feel that in every track here.


We pop gobblers are allowing a dark harvest to be reaped. We gaze from our corduroy futons as a strange ...

Saddle Creek 50

We pop gobblers are allowing a dark harvest to be reaped. We gaze from our corduroy futons as a strange breed-- the photogenic-- entrench themselves around us. Numbed by our prioritization of hottie-dom, we fail to imagine the entertainment dawn ahead, when no ugly (or even homely or everyperson-looking) talents are left in the spotlight. Who among the current crop of shellacked chesthairs will inherit Christopher Walken's seat at the hall of goons? Will news anchors finally be replaced by seductobots, completing their "evolution" from those crusty-old-whitey beginnings? Will our children ask us to explain how Joey Ramone's visage ever escaped mandatory veiling? (The female version of this look-sharp arc is even more distressing...)
The acts on Saddle Creek Records are effervescently photogenic. Pictures of them are taken, and published, accordingly, to provide a record of how far inland the epidermal epidemic has spread. Before that strapping Conor Oberst belted his woes around the world, Omaha was considered by many outsiders as one of those zones in which no one could hear you scream. Now, just as several eminent indie labels have done (Merge, Matador, etc), the Creek is celebrating itself and thanking its fans with a budget-priced, two-disc roster-showcase that balances the previously available with the unreleased, a self-consciously calmer election than the sometimes redundant or crass "classics"/"rarities" dichotomy. The compilation also reinforces the cultural significance of ten when it is multiplied by five.
Like the Drag City inbred buddy system, but cuter, Saddle Creek is rife with acts which are side-projects or recombinations of the label's key players: Now It's Overhead, whose two tracks showcase their shuffly R.E.Mism, contains Azure Ray, whose two tracks convey their evolution from gorgeous violin naifery to confident 4AD-caliber atmospherics. Desaparecidos is, of course, Bright Eyes with distortion; they include their album's most heartbreaking divorce anthem and a new song that actually benefits from the crap-scrapey production bonding its nuke-propaganda reels ("This explosion is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man"), its Tostito-crisp guitarvalanche (the chips are even featured backstage on one of this disc's 45 tedious/harmless film clips), and Oberst's panic-attack stylings ("I don't want to fight in a war/ I don't want to fight in a war/ I don't want to fight in a war"). The lyrics don't offer anything newer than, say, that decade-old team-up between Slayer and Ice-T, but "war sucks" appears to have attained profound-banality status, and we are thusly obliged to favor its reiterations.
About the Bright Eyes song: Yes, it perpetuates Oberst's long ride atop a champion thoroughbred named Contradiction Shitstorm, as he auditions for the lead in The Strange Case of Dr. Cobain and Mr. Sting. The song's lyrics teeter from fascinatingly perceptive to idiotically obvious, from piercing to quaint (aww, who still says "made love"?), from immediate to warmed-over. An ambitious screed about war-culture, ennui, eclipsed optimism, moodswings, and the weight of sex, the song flirts with its brilliant pop instincts but gets all complicated by the Saddle Creek soundalike syndrome, that tincture of Counting Crows-iness that is self-loving, but masochistically, reveling in the construction of altars to one's problems. At his best, Oberst is a conscientious and uninhibited examiner of manic yesterdays and corporate tomorrows; at his worst, he seems to be oversqueezing his teats to spray his audience with his precious soul-milk.
Elsewhere: The Good Life remains a darker and often deliberately poppier reservoir for Cursive's emoid frontman-- the former's new song is an insidiously catchy Cure-homaging moper, and the latter's "Nonsense" suffers from the risk it takes blending Bachmann-skronk with Smurf-scat. Mayday, whom you might know as Lullaby for the Working Class, don't outshine their hymnic already-available "Captain". Rilo Kiley includes her concert-closing chant-along "With Arms Outstretched", and an urgent femme-Pavement nugget either about depression or anorexia, or at least menstruation. Son, Ambulance won't escape "mini-Bright-Eyes" dismissal, which is unfortunate because his arty-cruise-ship arrangements are so strong, and he's able to write and sing (though in a voice very similar to Oberst's) about a wider range of subjects. Sorry About Dresden prove that they deserve better than being considered the label's Cracker or Spin Doctors; see their Rousing Critique of the Superficiality of Hanging Out #345 entitled "People Have Parties". (Interestingly, The Faint side project Broken Spindles and Desaparecidos side project Statistics found homes on other labels.)
But my secret obsession, The Faint, own this comp's finest moments with their practice-space jam, "Take Me to the Hospital". The Faint are much-reviled for being unnecessary arbiters of hump-me dystopia, but mang, they pretty much rule. Their debut is embarrassing (ahem, see Fork-praised fadboys The Rapture's trajectory, cough, ahem), yet the synth overhaul of The Faint's 1999 sophomore effort beat a lot of the current keyboard/dance voguers to the punch. "Hospital", for all its cheerleader nothingness ("Want you to take me the H/ Take me to the O/ want you take me to the S...") is a booming, spiraling, handclapping, screeching, futro masterwork of a Various Artists toss-off. Perhaps The Faint's next full-length will tone down their concept-album inclinations as they embrace the fun of being frontrunners of a wave of, uh, re-runners, making the years between !!! and Sexual Harassment, or Ladytron and Romeo Void, seem like an instant. Let's hope former skateboarder and frontman Todd Baechle doesn't end up singing to Muppets in Labyrinth Reloaded.
When I set out to follow The Faint for four days, bringing some brusque friends to annoy them and offset their borderline vapidity and nauseating photogenicness, I sent the band this fallacious letter, angry about The Faint's most recent "anti-corporate" album:
"Why the fan-rape, you culture-juh-huh-hammers? I just bought some tickets for The Faint, and was also forced to fuel an SUV for a Ticketmaster exec. WHAT THE FUCK? Why are you Total Jobbers with Ticketmaster? In case you don't know: THE FEES COST MORE THAN TWO TICKETS. For four tickets I paid 12 + 12 + 10 + 10 = 44. For the FUCKING "convenience and processing" fees I paid 4.25 + 4.25 +4.25 + 4.25 (convenience, to lubricate me) + 4.25 + 4.25 (processing, the actual ream) = 26 DOLLARS. FUCK YOU. I watched non-mall-punks have to shrug and go home, unable to buy tickets. I recommended they start swooning for Dischord bands. Rich kids, however, will be there for every subversive throb and squeal. Eddie Vedder's your outcredder. This seems cynical of you folks. Am I supposed to feel bad about the prospect of copying CDs for others from a fave label anymore? Am I supposed to get the same econo-critique rush from yer lyrics? Am I supposed to not chuck Saddle Creek 50 into a landfill?" Etc.
The Faint wrote back, noting with accuracy that I was a "rude person," and that they'd try to make other arrangements in the future (some of their gear was stolen days later). Anyway: My eternally drunken sidekick condemned Saddle Creek 50 as "the longest song I've ever heard," and I'll admit to being traumatized by a self-important soundman's mocking my status as the only person old enough to vote at a recent Cursive show. But The Faint's lovable fashion-dreck saves the Nebraska label's crew from sounding like children of the corn. I don't regret a minute of those consecutive days of being a pathetic Fainthead, even though I got so poisoned that I spray-painted my Mazda hot pink and ended up passed out on a faraway beach holding a hammer instead of my glasses. Police woke me to ask if I knew the naked woman in the water on PCP. My friends and I watched as the officers hauled her away. The scene would have made a perfect Faint video.


Focus can be a difficult thing to maintain in art. Once you've begun creating something, it's easy to ...

It's a Wonderful Life

Focus can be a difficult thing to maintain in art. Once you've begun creating something, it's easy to find yourself off on some tangent you never saw coming. It takes a certain amount of discretion, and often, a certain amount of objective distance, to decide which roads to continue down and which ones to abandon. In music, this is, of course, where producers come in. Their job is essentially to stop the artist from getting carried away with a questionable idea and to moderate decisions about direction and material.
Past Sparklehorse efforts have been plagued by a certain lack of focus. This doesn't mean they weren't good records-- in fact, 1998's Good Morning Spider was something of a creative triumph, even in spite of its general disorganization. That said, though, hiring an outside producer (not to mention fully ridding himself of all drug habits) seems to have done Sparklehorse frontman Mark Linkous a great deal of good. Superproducer Dave Fridmann has developed a certain Midas Touch over the years, imbuing nearly every album he works on with a distinctive sonic character, and It's a Wonderful Life has his fingerprints all over it.
The most focused Sparklehorse effort yet, the album flows along with the grace of a river occasionally stirred by a rapid or two. The half-songs and quickly squelched ideas of Linkous' past releases are absent in favor of fully fleshed pieces stuffed full of mellotrons, optigans, orchestrons, and sundry humming keyboards. Only once is its flow badly disrupted. (We'll get to that in a second.)
The majority of It's a Wonderful Life brims with electro American gothic ballads and fuzzy purees of lo-fi and hi-fi aesthetics. There aren't really any out-and-out rave-ups like "Pig" or "Happy Man," but a few of the mid-tempo numbers display enough bite for commercial radio play. (I'm asking too much, aren't I?) "Gold Day" snags the ear with a concise melodic hook and some snazzy mellotron flutes. And Linkous' defiantly surrealist approach to lyrics is in full effect here, with all manner of references to smiling babies, organ music, birds, and celestial bodies.
In fact, some of the lyrics are so surreal that it's hard to imagine they're even metaphors for anything. When Linkous implores, "Can you feel the rings of Saturn on your finger?" in the Vic Chesnutt-cast-adrift-in-a-post-modern-sound-collage number "Sea of Teeth," it's hard to believe that there's much hidden meaning behind it. Animal imagery also abounds; bees, poison frogs, roosters, dogs, doves, and horses all pop up on the first track. How exactly the line, "I'm full of bees that died at sea," proceeds logically to the title refrain of, "It's a wonderful life," is questionable at best, but the claustrophobic mix of optigan, static, chamberlin, and Linkous' plaintive delivery redeems the lyrical content with beautiful production and shimmering instrumentation.
The soulful PJ Harvey duet "Piano Fire" picks up the energy a bit, proffering lyrical imagery of dusty organs and pianos washing up on beaches, amid a heavily distorted guitar racket and subtly employed electronics. In different places, It's a Wonderful Life conjures recent Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, and Grandaddy, all bands who operate in roughly the same headspace as Linkous. The quietly bleeping "Apple Bed," in particular, recalls some of The Sophtware Slump's more elegiac moments.
Unfortunately, there's that one aforementioned sore thumb that interrupts the otherwise smooth flow of the album, so allow me to preface my next statement with the following diatribe: I love Tom Waits. His music is rarely short of brilliant on some level, and I've long admired his position as one of the most fearless, innovative, and downright unique songwriters on the planet. The man's craft is his genius personified, and I can't get enough of it.
So why does his contribution to It's a Wonderful Life suck so much? "Dog Door" is a miserable distraction. Imagine you're floating down a peaceful river on a raft. It's just you, the trees, the birds, and the fish. You don't have a care in the world. Then, suddenly, the violent hillbillies from Deliverance swoop down out of nowhere, pelting you with rocks and shouting an unmemorable phrase over and over again in an annoying, processed falsetto. That is "Dog Door." Allow me now to sulk like a denied child.
The flow of the album actually picks back up rather easily after "Dog Door" finally, mercifully ends, returning to the eerily placid fare that characterizes the rest of the proceedings with "More Yellow Birds." Soon after, "Babies on the Sun" closes things on a tired, but musically inventive note, with burbling electronics and looped string samples supporting typically cryptic lyrics.
It's a Wonderful Life is a strong offering for Sparklehorse, largely shaking off the excesses of past efforts (maddening Tom Waits collaboration aside) in favor of cohesion and structure. The focus unfortunately keeps Linkous from accessing any truly awe-inspiring standout moments like the ones on past records, but the overall result is a lot more rewarding in the long term.