Dissolving three decades of music into a 17-song noise opera, this pivotal live album captures a peerless set from a band who knew its days were numbered.

Live in Brooklyn 2011

The cover of Sonic Youth’s 1985 album Bad Moon Rising is one of indie rock’s most striking pieces of iconography, with its silhouette of a scarecrow in a crucifixion pose, topped with an evil-grinning Jack o’Lantern set ablaze against the backdrop of the New York City skyline at dusk. It’s a picture that both vividly reflects the album’s thematic autopsy of the dark heart burning inside the American dream, and the ’80s NYC underground itself, a visualization of the feral noise erupting at night in the shadow of the skyscrapers. And coming from a band that’s hardly lacking for T-shirt-worthy album covers, Bad Moon Rising has remained the perfect avatar for Sonic Youth’s violent collision of primitivism and futurism, and their tendency to invest live performance with all the horror and transcendence of a ritual sacrifice.
A quarter century later, Sonic Youth would recreate that incendiary scene on the shores of the East River—though instead of lighting up a wicker man, they offered up themselves. The band’s August 2011 appearance at the Williamsburg waterfront wasn’t technically their last concert, but it was the final appearance of the Sonic Youth that we had come to know and love: the familial, telepathic, eternally spry entity who could translate avant-garde guitarchitecture into punk-rock abandon and vice versa, led by the world’s coolest mom and dad. Behind the scenes, however, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon were on the verge of ending their 27-year marriage, and once the breakup was made public two months later, Sonic Youth’s seemingly eternal flame was suddenly extinguished with a bucket of cold water. The band would fulfill a handful of South American dates already on the books for that November, a lame-duck campaign Gordon would later describe in her memoir as a “raw, weird pornography of strain and distance.” But if someone were to make a factually sloppy Bohemian Rhapsody-style biopic about Sonic Youth, then the Williamsburg show would be its glorious Live Aid-sized climax—the revisionist Hollywood ending for a doomed New York institution.
Live in Brooklyn 2011 was originally made available in 2020 as part of the deluge of official bootlegs that’s flooded Sonic Youth’s Bandcamp page, but it’s the first live recording from that batch to be mixed, mastered, and packaged for physical release (via Silver Current, the boutique outsider-psych label run by Comets on Fire/Howlin’ Rain honcho Ethan Miller). The special treatment is a testament to the show’s significance in Sonic Youth lore and to the peerless performance captured on the recording. Those who experienced this show first-hand, blissfully unaware of the drama stewing offstage, were treated to the rare spectacle of a band hitting explosive new peaks as a live act some 30 years into the game. But with the benefit of hindsight, Live in Brooklyn 2011 sounds more like the adrenalized fight-or-flight response from a band that knew its days were numbered. As Gordon would later write of the band’s final shows: “What got me through was being onstage, the visceral thrill of performing. Extreme noise and dissonance can be an incredibly cleansing thing.”
Where career-spanning setlists from most veteran bands will inevitably succumb to wild variances in tone if not quality, Live in Brooklyn 2011 dissolves three decades into a holistic 17-track noise opera that enshrines Sonic Youth’s greatest attributes and contradictions: a band that dipped its toes into the alt-rock mainstream without ever planting their feet in it, who rose to amphitheater-headliner status while routinely disavowing the old showbiz maxim of giving the people what they want. The Brooklyn set forsakes the band’s most popular songs to illuminate the darker corners of their discography and build bridges between them. The show came at the tail end of the promotional campaign for what would be Sonic Youth’s final official full-length, 2009’s The Eternal, but the album that dominates the setlist is, fittingly, Bad Moon Rising—the record that first pushed them out of New York and onto the American indie frontlines, and which, here, symbolizes both a homecoming and full-circle farewell. And if that significance wasn’t known to the Williamsburg crowd that night, a rare, complementary airing of 1983’s caterwauling “Kill Yr Idols” feels like a coded, foreshadowing communique.
Thanks to the undiminished intensity of drummer Steve Shelley and the steely rhythmic pulse of latter-day bassist Mark Ibold, the back-to-back Bad Moon Rising bookends “Brave Men Run (In My Family)” and “Death Valley ’69” absolutely clobber where they used to clang, making them natural companions to Lee Ranaldo’s signature psych-out “Eric’s Trip,” the rocket-launching glam noise of 1994’s “Starfield Road,” and the untamed thrust of The Eternal’s “Calming the Snake.” But the connections being drawn here are as much lyrical as they are musical, with Gordon’s ’85-era mantra “Flower,” Dirty’s sardonic Heart homage “Drunken Butterfly,” and The Eternal’s eye-rolling “Sacred Trickster” foregrounding the feminist fury that courses through the entire Sonic Youth canon, and which acquires an even more acerbic edge when you consider the dysfunctional dynamics Gordon was grappling with at the time. (The latter song’s sarcastic quip—“What’s it like being a girl in a band?”—takes on a whole new discomfiting dimension when you know she’s singing it alongside her soon-to-be ex as the ship’s going down.)
At the end of the show’s first encore, Sonic Youth make an uncharacteristic concession to popular taste by trotting out the beloved Dirty warhorse “Sugar Kane,” whose Marc Jacobs/Chloë Sevigny-festooned video proved to be the high-water mark of the band’s early-’90s crossover. The song’s atypical appearance amid a setlist filled with the deepest of deep cuts underscores the sheer improbability of these avant-rock radicals becoming momentary MTV stars. The group’s contrarian essence is further epitomized by the second encore, where Sonic Youth deliver their first-ever performance of the locomotive, Velvets-esque title track to Moore’s 1995 solo album Psychic Hearts—a move that, in retrospect, points the way to the sort of taut and tuneful jams he would later pursue with the Thurston Moore Group.
Then, for their last song at their last-ever New York City show, Sonic Youth revisit one of the first pieces of music they made there, back when the prospect of playing to more than 50 people outside of lower Manhattan was a pipe dream. Appearing on their 1983 debut, Confusion Is Sex, “Inhuman” sports the sort of needling guitars and galloping, disco-not-disco backbeat that reminds you of this band’s roots in the British post-punk of the day. But here, that four-minute track is distended and disemboweled past the nine-minute mark into a free-form noisepocalypse, providing an instant pocket history of a band that quickly outgrew their obvious influences to pursue an invigorating and unsettling squall that was entirely their own. As the embers of feedback start to dim, Moore declares, “With the power of love, anything is possible,” and he wasn’t bullshitting. Love is what made it possible for a commercially unviable 30-year-old band to attract thousands of people to North Williamsburg on that hot August night in 2011, subject them to a setlist of abrasive obscurities, and still be greeted with a rapturous hero’s salute. And once the love between its two lead singers was lost, the very idea of Sonic Youth became impossible.


On their latest album, the Boston trio explores an eerie, percussion-heavy sound that maintains the adventurous spirit of their best work.

All Fiction

With their 2012 breakout Dripping, Pile cemented their status as one the loudest, most quietly influential DIY rock bands with riotous live shows and a discography that brawls with post-hardcore. In recent years, however, the Boston group has been plotting a reinvention. Following 2019’s Green and Gray, they released an experimental cassette tape forbidden from being uploaded online, a completely improvised record, and an LP’s worth of reimagined solo versions of their songs. By the time they regrouped as a trio to record All Fiction, Pile were happy to let their identity crisis take the wheel. Forget about the manic guitars or the thrashing momentum of their old songs. Now, Pile are all about minimalist experimentalism and John Carpenter-style synths—a haunting yet jarring twist that ends up exuding the same adventurous spirit of their best work.
Pile cut to the chase with “It Comes Closer.” It’s less than a bang than it is the smoke rising from the barrel of a gun. Piano chords plod quietly while vocalist Rick Maguire sings along to swells of violin and cello. The production has a degraded quality to it, like a demo tape recorded onto another, older tape. This uncharacteristic mood piece sets the scene for an album designed to keep listeners at arms’ length. Big choruses are jettisoned for ambling, uncertain passages. Strings and synths are at the forefront, where they hum with a delicate warmth. Guitar and bass are sparse, and they often sound as if they’re being played on the far side of an abandoned warehouse. The most obvious departure is Maguire’s vocals, which are pushed to the background. His forlorn singing and occasional yells are submerged beneath the music, creating the illusion that he’s buried beneath rubble; whether he’s fighting to crawl out from under it or lays there suffocating in acceptance is up to interpretation.
Pile have long conjured imagery straight out of a horror anthology: spiders crawling up someone’s ass, a ghost trapped inside a human stomach, the unshakeable urge to get dressed and light yourself on fire. For once, Pile lure goosebumps through the music alone. “Link Arms” segues from a three-note piano part straight out of a paranormal film to spiraling violins fit for Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s dystopian panic. On “Nude With a Suitcase,” Alex Molini uses a Rhodes piano and Omnichord to cast an ambient haze that turns downright eerie by the outro. Even when Pile return to traditional rock song structures, like the thundering “Loops” or “Poisons,” the crackling distortion and alarm-like synths build a type of musical claustrophobia. Despite the absence of a clear narrative, All Fiction creates a cinematic portrait of a narrator slowly accepting their sanity is brittle, which makes sense considering Pile drew influence from the tense yet uncluttered scores of There Will Be Blood and Watchmen.
If Pile’s previous albums trained your eyes to follow Maguire, then this one forces you to focus on his surroundings. Drummer Kris Kuss has long been the driving force behind the band’s tenacity. He’s unforgiving behind the drum kit, hitting with aggression but giving off the aura of a gentle giant. On “Gardening Hours,” he turns sporadic drum grooves into a cool, jazzy rhythm that later slows down. The way his anthemic fills turn into a towering beast on “Forgetting” without overpowering the strings brings to mind the astute style of Unwound’s Sara Lund. Even during the album’s interludes, his airy percussion earns the spotlight without trying.
In 2009, Pile released a stripped-back guitar blues album called Jerk Routine; it’s felt like an outlier in their catalog until now. All Fiction proposes that the trajectory of Pile’s discography is not a line, but a horseshoe. The new album is a similar collection of sparse, atmospheric songs, but it centers around drums and percussion. With Kuss taking the lead, the band settles into a new identity that functions better than expected considering they’ve spent the past 16 years refining what a modern-day rock band could be. Avoiding the clichés of a band ditching their guitars for synthesizers, Pile find a happy medium, approaching the album through inquisitive means and experimental methods to create a similarly intense, albeit quieter, record. You have to bristle and tug at it to get past the barbed wire around these recordings, but once you do, you’re immersed in a surprisingly detailed and evocative world, just beyond the limits of rock.


The first major release in three years from British DJ and producer Maya Jane Coles—once sampled by Nicki Minaj—is a moody two-hour collection that highlights her weaknesses.

Take Flight

Maya Jane Coles’ breakthrough came down to a single sound: a bright, bouncy organ bassline that gave her 2010 hit “What They Say” its luminous energy. It was hardly an original sound—in fact, it dominated overground house music in the 1990s via hits like Robin S’ “Show Me Love” and Jaydee’s “Plastic Dreams”—but the British producer’s tune made good use of its shivering, octave-spanning frequencies. (So good, in fact, that Nicki Minaj sampled the tune on 2014’s “Truffle Butter.”) Coles’ 2012 DJ-Kicks mix, with its blend of deep house, post-dubstep, and pop melodies, also positioned her as a DJ right at the crux of the zeitgeist. But none of her subsequent output has had quite the same sense of immediacy. Her debut album, 2013’s Comfort, lacked a strong identity, and her 2014 Fabric mix was pleasant but hardly visionary. Coles remains an in-demand DJ—she played Coachella this past spring, and her calendar is peppered with summer dates in Ibiza—but she hasn’t put out a major release since 2014. Three years is a long time in dance music; perhaps to make up for her extended absence, she marks her return to the studio with a 24-track album that runs nearly two hours. Unfortunately, the wider canvas only serves to highlight her weaknesses as a producer.
Coles has always had a predilection for dusky hues and soft-to-the-touch textures, and she sticks with the same palette here. For basslines, she takes the glowering low end of drum ‘n’ bass and smears it like charcoal. Her drums are a mix of skipping house grooves and chopped-up breakbeats. For tone color, she favors swirly synth pads and clean-toned guitar lines reminiscent of the xx, and she fills in the rest with either her own breathy vocals or those of guest singers who sound remarkably like her. Listeners who can’t get enough of these sorts of sounds are in luck, because Take Flight never departs from Coles’ formula. But what at first might seem agreeably moody becomes stultifying after a few tracks. The limitations of her approach are apparent in the fact that she uses the same breathy tone and vaguely downcast melodies whether she’s singing about sexual desire (“Weak”) or depression (“Blackout”)—a risk-averse strategy that sells short her music’s emotional potential.
There are some interesting sounds bubbling under the surface. The filtered bass of “Weak” casts a glance back at Depeche Mode; “Old Jam” pairs a sanded-down sax bleat with a bass tone that quivers like a beam of light in deep water. Just as often, though, her sounds feel arbitrary and generic, as though she’d started out with presets and forgotten to replace them with something better. And her tendency to keep piling on synths and reverb means that the most distinctive sounds still get lost in an undifferentiated beige mush.
Even at a comparatively short four or five minutes long, individual tracks are a slog. In song after song, Coles opts for the same kinds of four-bar chord progressions, which chug gamely away from start to finish. This kind of linear progression makes sense for DJs, but in an album geared at home listening, the mind craves some kind of variety: the flip from verse to chorus and back again, the unexpected detour of a well-placed bridge. Here, once you’ve heard the first 16 bars of a given track, you know exactly what it’s going to do.
The only thing that varies much is tempo. In this, Coles covers an admirable range. There are a half-dozen tracks of slow-burning trip-hop, and another handful of cuts are slow-motion house, somewhere between 100 and 110 beats per minute. Nine or 10 songs follow the textbook stomp and skip of classic deep house, and “Let You Go,” the fastest thing here, reprises the ambient dubstep of Coles’ Nocturnal Sunshine project. Instead of dividing the album into a house-tempo disc and a downtempo disc, Coles alternates between the two modes. But after five or six tracks, the strategy becomes as predictable as her by-the-book chord progressions; the fast/slow/fast/slow sequencing kills any kind of momentum the album might otherwise have achieved.
Take Flight isn’t without its pleasures. “Werk” is a lovely deep-house tune propelled by a skipping hint of UK garage. Its lilting vocal strip faintly echoes Blaze’s classic “Lovelee Dae,” and its pointillist arrangement—a daub of sax here, a pinprick of synth there—benefits from the everything-in-its-right-place sense of cohesion that her songs too often lack. It goes without saying that Coles needs to learn to edit, but more than that, she needs to rediscover the sense of focus that distinguished her best work in the first place. As “What They Say” proved, sometimes going back to basics is the best way forward.


The fantastic album from the Portland-based artist Graham Jonson turns beat music and bedroom pop into a complex psychedelic world with vast emotional horizons. His songs are lush and boundless.

quickly, quickly: The Long and Short of It

The Long and Short of It

Three years ago, a teenager named Graham Jonson released a standout beat tape under the pseudonym quickly, quickly. Though it superficially resembled the loop-by-numbers tunes that had become de rigueur background music for hard-working high schoolers, the music on the tape was ever-changing, new instruments and melodies appearing spontaneously like the colors in a changing sky. Indebted to Dilla, the Pharcyde, and the phantom loops of Burial, Jonson’s work had all the hallmarks of sample-based music, with two exceptions. He didn’t content himself with a novel break or a pretty melody, but stacked ideas and details until each of the tracks included felt like a world unto itself. And there were no instrumental samples; he made it all himself.
It’s cause for optimism that the tape, which could have easily been lost online, not only won the young dude an audience, but also inspired him to work harder, extending the boundaries of his sound. On his debut album, The Long and Short of It, Jonson, now 21, reconciles his approach to beat music with a form of bedroom pop, using two genres known for their modular simplicity to create complex psychedelic music with vast emotional horizons.
The comfort produced by even the most rudimentary beat music is a feature of the genre: a steady rhythm and a pleasant loop make for a safe and cozy listening experience. The best producers tend not let any particular pattern breathe for too long, but the crush of tracks broadcast on lo-fi channels can feel as if they’re running in place. Bedroom pop, at its least imaginative, can be similarly static, guitar chords and banal lyrics taking the place of beats’n’loops. Jonson has little tolerance for any of this.
It would be wrong to refer to his music, which is steady and self-possessed, as restless. Rather, listening to The Long and Short of It is like getting to see firsthand the electrification of billions of neurons in the mind of your quietest friend, an astonishing intensity of motion and ideas swirling under a uniform surface. “Shee” is a good introduction to the album, and reintroduction for Jonson’s singing voice. (In his early teens, when he came up with the name quickly, quickly, Jonson was in a pop-punk band, and you can hear the ghosts of frontmen past in his flat, unselfconscious baritone.) The song opens with an evocative lyric—“She takes the bus at night to ease her worries”—then brings vocal harmonies to the fore, breathes deeply at the two-minute mark, and with a little more than a minute to go, launches into an ecstatic solo that takes a right turn into a final verse and disappears like a tendril of cloudstuff.
Though Jonson affects something resembling a positive attitude on the album’s early tracks—all but begging a partner to “Come Visit Me” on the second track, he commits to personal growth while she’s away—the mood darkens in the latter half, informed by his vocal tone and spare lyricism. Another standout, “Wy,” is an anthem for hypochondriacs, on which Jonson takes stock of his various ailments: heavy neck, aching back, spots in his eyes. He wishes them all away on a stormy and ambiguous chorus, and as the song’s insistent thwacking beat subsides in its final minute, there’s a sense of the dubious relief that Jonson may have in mind.
The album ends quietly, with the Felbm-like instrumental, “Otto’s Dance.” But a quick resequencing of the album offers a firmer resolution: Try closing with the opener, “Phases,” which features an impromptu backing band, giving us a sense of Jonson’s ability to lead an ensemble. The poet Sharrif Simmons utters the words, “It comes in circles” and a lovely storm of an instrumental that prominently features a saxophone solo by Hailey Niswanger, which may be the reason this album scans to some as jazz or jazzy.
That, or the fact that we simply don’t expect the genres in which Jonson is rooted to yield sound so rich, so filled with astonishing detail. He admitted to Flaunt Magazine a couple of weeks back that he had been trying to shed “my previous ‘Lo-Fi Beats To Study To’ reputation, as I think I have a lot more to offer as a musician.” But on The Long and Short of It, Jonson doesn’t abandon the sound that made him stand out back in 2018. Instead, he shows that the same workmanship and care can elevate a song about a relationship, and that a song about a relationship can feel as cosmic, as infinite, as an instrumental. Jonson doesn’t use this album to shed his reputation or reinvent himself. To use a favorite expression of the thousands of SoundCloud producers who should be taking furious notes: He builds.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The latest entry in a vital reissue series from Numero Group lives at the nexus of the Boston jazz-rock band’s strange evolution. Their daring interplay sounds as if the songs are still being constructed as you listen.

The Bed Is in the Ocean

From the opening lines, Karate set the scene. “So quiet,” Geoff Farina sings in a determined voice, “I can hear that the refrigerator is on.” Just like that, less than 10 seconds into The Bed Is in the Ocean, you’re right there with him. The room hushes; your attention heightens; things you normally overlook rush into screaming focus. Over the span of the Boston trio’s six studio albums, they transformed from a typical 1990s post-hardcore outfit into something harder to pin down, a rock band guided entirely by emotion and atmosphere. To cap off their brief career, their final recording before disbanding in 2005 was a cover of “A New Jerusalem” by Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis: a patron saint for this type of career-long journey toward silence.
The latest entry in a vital reissue series from Numero Group, 1998’s The Bed Is in the Ocean lives at the nexus of Karate’s strange evolution. Its nine songs are bold and memorable, with lyrics designed for tightly packed crowds to scream along with. It’s the kind of album whose choruses can only be transcribed in all caps: “GOD DON’T MAKE THINGS THAT YOU CAN REARRANGE.” “THERE IS HARD RAIN WHERE I’M WALKING.” “WHO CALLED? WHAT THE HELL DID THEY SAY?” Three records in, Karate had learned to pace these moments so they arrived like knockout punches, each landing harder than the one preceding it.
And yet, once Farina reaches these climaxes—with an excitable, precise delivery that sounds a little like Jason Molina if he’d raised himself on D.C. punk instead of classic country—you’ve only heard part of the story. There is a feeling in these recordings that the compositions are just outlines, and once Farina runs out of words, the band starts kicking into overdrive. You can practically hear his bandmates—drummer Gavin McCarthy and bassist Jeffrey Goddard—contemplate where to go next, how to steer the songs in unfamiliar directions: say, in the heart-tugging post-rock crescendo of “Outside Is the Drama” or the proggy interludes in “There Are Ghosts.”
Part of Karate’s shapeshifting was due to Farina’s voracious habits as a listener and his expanding repertoire as a guitarist. “I’ve come to terms with the fact that I just have an ongoing identity crisis” is how he put it last year. “I just bounce around, and I will never settle down.” Around the time of The Bed Is in the Ocean, Karate began distinguishing themselves from their punk-influenced peers by drawing attention to their jazz bonafides. Farina, a Berklee graduate who currently teaches at DePaul, was proudly defiant about his wide-ranging taste. At a time when Steely Dan’s smooth, sophisticated epics were the antithesis of DIY cool, he wrote music that not only seemed to be influenced by them but also, on a 1999 solo single, openly pledged his love.
Where indie bands like the Sea and Cake built on the muted, springtime breeze of jazz-rock, on The Bed Is in the Ocean, Karate scraped up the grit. Aside from being an excellently recorded album—one that benefits from this type of bare-bones vinyl reissue—the performances feel live and electric, carrying the spark of improvised takes. The roll of McCarthy’s snares throughout “Fatal Strategies” seems to mimic the conspiratorial trill of Farina’s lyrics during the first part, making its wordless back half feel like a work in progress, still being constructed as you listen. This interplay highlights the growing confidence of a band that often used their live shows to workshop new material. They learned from their jazz training to embrace a sense of danger, knowing each risk could lead to their next destination.
While Karate would test the boundaries of this experimental style on 2000’s spacey, masterful Unsolved, the songs on The Bed Is in the Ocean maintain a foot in the world of their early, more traditional sound. The closing “Not to Call the Police,” in that context, feels like a pivot point. For much of the song, the trio explores its quiet-loud dynamics with a noirish mood. The slow groove of Goddard’s bass against Farina’s bending notes and McCarthy’s snaking rhythm conjures a sense of quiet motion, like snow blowing through empty streets on a freezing night, after a blizzard stops.
Then, at the end of the second chorus, the band slows down, quieting their instruments for an instrumental break and pausing every few bars for dramatic effect. Eventually, they head down the runway for a gradual slow build that never quite takes off. It begins with Farina strumming his guitar and listing a few stray, disassociated images. Soon his bandmates join him, offering flurries of emphasis at the end of each line. “And I can see my breath,” Farina notices in the final lyric, just before the band kicks in for one last attack. And as they thrash and sway, you might exhale with him, noticing how it floats and lingers and dissolves in the air around you.


The East Atlanta rapper’s latest project is full of whimsical beats and DatPiff-era nostalgia. It proves you don’t need shiny pop hooks to make a thrilling rap record in 2023.

Gumbo

Young Nudy is known for his appetite: He is a consummate foodie and perpetual victim of the munchies who has become something like the MF DOOM of East Atlanta. To satiate the appetite of his devoted followers—who hungrily await the release of culinary-themed joints like “Loaded Baked Potato,” “Sunflower Seeds,” and “Blue Cheese Salad”—Nudy has served up a 13-course meal, also known as his new project Gumbo. Every track hits a different vector of the food pyramid: “Brussel Sprout” and “Okra” for your daily serving of greens, “McChicken” or “Fish & Chips” for lunch, and a slice of “Passion Fruit” to cleanse the palate.
The loose concept shows how Nudy’s projects have tightened over time. Though his mixtapes have rarely ever ventured over an hour, each release brings increased cohesion and focus, with more care given to the sequencing of the tracklist. Gumbo plays like a fraternal twin to last year’s EA Monster, down to the similar slime-green and red color schemes of their cover art. Nudy offers a funhouse distortion of the late 2000s DatPiff era, manifesting himself as the flesh-and-blood version of the mixtape covers where Gucci Mane was photoshopped onto Buzz Lightyear, or depicted devouring pancakes.
In a 2019 interview, Nudy self-effacingly remarked that he picks “all the beats motherfuckers hate.” But he’s not giving himself enough credit, because it’s his unpredictable taste that has inspired his cult following, and it’s what keeps his work from ever sliding into a formula. Regular collaborator Coupe handles most of the production on Gumbo, and his evocative style enhances but never overwhelms Nudy’s singular cartoonishness. It’s not too trippy, not too trappy, but always just right.
Opener “Brussel Sprout” is disarmingly gentle, built around a twinkling keyboard line. But before there’s even a chance to breathe, the beat deftly swerves into the more aggressive “Pancake,” which sounds like a ’90s No Limit cut beamed into outer space. That quick, unexpected beat switch is a standout moment on Gumbo—it’s hardly even a moment, just the gap between songs. Still, that careful attention to detail is a quality that sets Nudy apart from other rappers of his generation. His work feels like a full album experience, but it also functions as a playlist on shuffle.
So many of Nudy’s selections feel influenced by video game soundtracks, but never in a way that’s self-consciously retro or referential. The Mario Paint-like sheen always pulls back before going full chiptune, offset by thick bass and tight drums, with a tactility that keeps the samples and synthesizers from getting lost in a faraway galaxy. There’s a sense of whimsy here, one that doesn’t ever tilt into novelty or preciousness. “Portabella,” Nudy’s affectionate ode to dosing, is as genuinely psychedelic as anything on Lil Yachty’s Let’s Start Here: Wavy, new-age synthesizers gently ebb and flow, as bells reverberate and Nudy’s voice melts into a dubby haze. More than any single reference point, Nudy’s production shares a core principle with video game scoring, which often realizes the possibilities of music as a fully electronic medium. He and his producers have no interest in specific instrument sounds, or in beats that feel analog; he’s drawn to the open-ended potential of sound itself.
The guests that Nudy pulls into his orbit on Gumbo make for grounded foils to his ever-mutating voice. Pi’erre Bourne shows up for a shift on “Pot Roast,” along with Key Glock; the track’s MIDI horns might be more cutesy than anything you’d hear on one of the Memphis rapper’s solo projects, but his driving flow is a perfect partner for the tough 808 foundation. The 21 Savage-featuring “Peaches & Eggplants” sounds like it could have been ghost-produced by BeatKing––it’s a beguiling piece of strip-club minimalism propelled by little more than a pounding drum and a noodling synth line. Both Glock and Savage play comic straight men, underlining his goofball sensibility with their more resonant and rooted voices.
The astral sound popularized by producers like Pi’erre Bourne and Working on Dying has usually been favored by rappers working at the edges of genre, flirting with the vernaculars of rock and pop. While Nudy may be in the same universe as artists like Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert, and often plays with a similar sound library, his work remains firmly rooted in rap tradition, refreshingly free of gimmickry or strained hybridity. There are no shiny pop hooks and no guitar riffs here, but Nudy’s still looking to the future. In today’s industry, when a rapper is labeled “experimental,” it usually means they’ve moved beyond the genre. But Nudy’s core remains solid: Gumbo, along with his entire body of work, is evidence that there’s still new ground to be tread and fresh sounds to explore within rap itself. The blend of spices might be Nudy’s own, but the flavor of Gumbo is unmistakably hip-hop.


Composer John Luther Adams and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche collaborate on a recording of Luther Adams' roiling percussion work Ilimaq. Luther Adams won a Pulitzer last year for Become Ocean, while Kotche has made some serious inroads into modern classical, and the two outsiders find a lot in common here.

Glenn Kotche / John Luther Adams: Ilimaq

Ilimaq

Until recently, composer John Luther Adams and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche would both have been regarded as unlikely draws in the world of classical music programming. During his years in Alaska—far away from the postgraduate-composition academy—Adams specialized in minimalist-influenced works that tended to avoid the driving pulse that made minimalism popular with a wide audience. For his part, Kotche spent a lot of time touring with Jeff Tweedy.
But things can change quickly (especially for a genre with such a long tradition). For Adams, the reversal of fortune came with the mania surrounding his 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece Become Ocean: a symphony-length orchestral approximation of maritime ebb and flow. Though Ocean didn’t represent an overhaul of Adams’s aesthetic, it brought his environmentalist’s appreciation for the natural world to a new conceptual height. (The title also gave uninitiated listeners a hint regarding what to expect from his serene-then-raging compositions.) Meantime, Kotche's 2014 classical album Adventureland felt distinguished—even in an active time for indie artists looking to prove their conservatory chops. (The drummer also performed brilliantly on composer Missy Mazzoli's album Vespers for a New Dark Age.)
In the aftermath of his Pulitzer win, Adams has been easier to spot. He’s since moved to New York, where his pieces are programmed at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. Next year, Adams will be the "composer in residence" at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival—the all-genres-welcome avant-bash that also presents Wolf Eyes and Yo La Tengo. Given this, it’s hardly surprising to find Kotche participating in a recording of Adams’s percussion-driven work, Ilimaq.
That title, which is Inuit for "spirit journey," isn’t kidding around. Scored for three different "stations" of percussion instruments that the drummer moves between, during a performance, this recorded version also tosses in field recordings of nature, ambient accompaniment, and some live-electronic processing of Kotche’s playing. If that sounds like a busy experience, it can be—but only when experienced as a whole. There’s a superficial stasis that masks much of the development here; if you dive into the 48-minute work expecting an instant hit of obvious Pulitzer-genius, you might find yourself initially underwhelmed.
The twelve-minute opening movement "Descent" sounds at first like one long bass drum roll—hurtling forward for a bit, decelerating, then pushing ahead once more. But its closing section presents odd groupings of notes for Kotche to navigate as Adams’s electronic environment undergoes subtle variations. The following movement, "Under the Ice", delights in a teasing ambiguity created by the blend of field recordings, electronics, and Kotche’s gentle cymbal work. The cumulative effect is so hypnotic and meditative that when clear, descending pairs of notes appear in "The Sunken Gamelan", they hit with the force of power chords.
"Untune the Sky" brings everything from the composition’s first half hour together for a rite that finds Kotche wailing on an expanded kit, and it’s here where the drummer’s technique is the most impressive. After that apex of clamor, "Ascension" provides a calming coda of high-pitch drones. As a suggestive mirror-image of the piece’s opening "Descent," it’s satisfying and logical—though the chief virtue of this piece is Adams’s slow-motion way of arriving at grander, less predictable change.


On his third solo album, the former Bloc Party frontman unexpectedly trades electronic trappings for a folksy, fingerpicked inner-soul audit.

Fatherland

So much for an awkward phase. When we met Kele Okereke in 2005, on Bloc Party’s debut album, Silent Alarm, he seemed to have skipped that itchy, pupal phase of most indie-rock frontmen, those years spent in someone else’s idea of cool: the hair too effortfully shaggy, the swoon slightly too melodramatic, 30% too much leather on the body. Just 23 and a university student in London, he was arch and stylish yet never detached; he could seem downright frantic, really, in how much he wanted the world to spin in tow with his own idealism. He was the ideal avatar for this band with a formidable rhythm section, intuitive post-rock guitars, and three other members also spoiled for photogenic angles. Even when Bloc Party’s original lineup strained in their experiments (slide guitar, Auto-Tune), and sounded exhausted in the half-life of their original ferocity (Four), they never failed to be fantastic live, when all the studio clutter melted away and there remained four men of pared-down resolve. That’s when the real magic of Bloc Party happened—when the lads who wrote “Octopus” remembered they only had two hands each.
In his first two solo albums, as the mononymous Kele, Okereke brought a different sort of focus. The Boxer and Trick slotted into Bloc Party’s persistent breakup rumors with their profound apathy for rock music, doling out spiky, uneven house and lo-fi electro primed with xylophones, upstart female dance vocalists (Jodie Scantlebury, Yasmin Shahmir), and Okereke’s durable pathos. Now, on his third record, this time under his full name, the erstwhile frontman treads the turf of most rockers’ first solo forays: the folksy, fingerpicked inner-soul audit. Fatherland is a significantly simplified effort, a work of gentle, singer-songwriter consideration largely haunted by lost loves rendered as exactingly as still lifes. It’s a retrospective of undoings with a cold eye turned inward; it feels cumulative when, in that marbled English accent, he murmurs, “Maybe this is payback for a youth on the run/For all the hearts I did break” (“You Keep on Whispering His Name”), guitar plucks spare and unforgiving beneath him.
In this conspicuous lateral step, in its avoidance of studio sheen and flurried moving parts, Fatherland can feel like a particularly long discourse, one still working out the threads worth repeating. Okereke is acutely aware of the clock, weary of what may not scan as appropriate in his advancing age (all of 35, but he’s a scene veteran, after all). He’s not as amiable at last call anymore: “From the palace of Versailles to the streets of Peckham Rye/You crave the dizziest of heights, but we’re caught out at the lights,” he chides a lover who, honestly, sounds a bit long-suffering themselves (elsewhere in this song, “Streets Been Talking,” Okereke takes a potshot at their tattoo). He spends the holidays apart from his mate, ignoring the sloppy festivities around him to worry that their love is already wobbling, flamenco guitar purring lightly beneath him (“The New Year Party”). Consistently, he seems more content with quiet scrutiny than outer flash; at one point, he sings in falsetto reverence to “Yemaya,” a maternal Santería water goddess, over a brooding, vaguely Celtic string arrangement. Somewhat inexplicably, there is also a ragtime piano ditty (“Capers”).
Okereke, one of indie rock’s few openly gay singers, has a facility with using the male pronouns of his partners in a way seldom heard in the genre. In “Grounds for Resentment,” his deceptively chipper, organ-tinged duet with Olly Alexander of Years & Years, both singers’ lissome jazz-pop trills underscore the rarity here: two men singing their heartbreak to each other, on a relatively mainstream album. Their interplay is charming, the sort of drolly performative two-step of people who know their reconciliation is inevitable: “I kept your T-shirt and your cap/All this evidence is surely looking bad,” admits Alexander softly. It’s Fatherland’s second-most tender track.
The first is “Savannah,” Okereke’s rootsy ode to his newborn daughter. That song, in its Jeff Buckley-esque guitar, dusty handclaps, and seraphic male harmonies, is a lovely moment of paternal wonder. “Oh Savannah you look like your mother/But I did not know her so well,” he serenades her, a beguiling line that stirs many possibilities as he urges her onward to be kind and “let love flow through your soul, always.” It’s the most helpless in awe Okereke has sounded since “This Modern Love,” Silent Alarm’s timeless tearjerker on the complexity of recognizing love and fearing it in tandem. He’s come miles since then, and shed a lot of that noise—and he sounds anything but lost now.


FitzGerald is an expert synthesist who merges the pop-friendly house and garage of his native London and the patient, muted techno of his adopted home, Berlin. Fading Love is his most writerly album to date, largely eschewing software and completely avoiding sampled vocals in favor of more rounded, organic sounds and live guest vocalists.

Fading Love

A quiet figure on the periphery of this generation of British electronic music, George FitzGerald has spent the last half-decade carving out a space for himself with a series of increasingly refined EPs, singles, and remixes. If you want to think of that space in purely geographic terms, it's somewhere between the pop-friendly house and garage of his native London and the patient, muted techno of his adopted home, Berlin. You can also think of it as music with one foot in the club and another in the aisles of your local fast fashion emporium, living in that liminal realm between body music and headphones-oriented composition. FitzGerald isn't an innovative force by any means, but he's an expert synthesist, able to fold a wide array of influences into radiant, splashy cuts like 2013's high water mark "I Can Tell (By the Way You Move)". Fading Love is his first full-length release, and it's marked by a maturity that FitzGerald's earned through his time in the trenches, writing and mixing and performing dozens of live sets.
As part of the larger arc of FitzGerald's career, Fading Love is a natural step forward: it's his most writerly album to date, largely eschewing software and completely avoiding sampled vocals in favor of more rounded, organic sounds and live guest vocalists. Its best qualities are ones that typically lurk in the background of electronic music: restraint, consistency, and an eye on achieving larger thematic goals. The album is built around a relationship that fell apart, and it's appropriately overcast given that fact. There are moments where you can hear FitzGerald toying with a melody that could easily fill a club or send a festival crowd into a frenzy, only to pull back and focus on melancholy once again; "Knife to the Heart" is the best example, with a titanic synth line worthy of EDM's bro princes relegated to spot duty.
Its other highlights find a middle ground between the genteel, bookish techno of label-mate Jon Hopkins and the ruthless pop-house of Disclosure, electronic music's reigning boy kings. Single "Full Circle" and "Crystallise" manage an impressive balancing act: you can imagine them slotting in on the radio somewhere, but they also don't sound quite like anything else in that sphere. Delicately constructed and heavy with emotion, they're the best examples of what FitzGerald can accomplish working in this transitional vein.
Fading Love is set up to reward the same focus it demonstrates: if you dig into each new muted meditation and immerse yourself in FitzGerald's bubbling little temples of thought, you'll find yourself entranced. It doesn't have the same impact when it's flipped on in the background, soundtracking chores or a morning commute: then, it verges on soporific. The guest appearances by singers Oli Bayston (a.k.a. Boxed In) and Lawrence Hart don't help: they're meant to complement FitzGerald's arrangements rather than create any sort of spark. FitzGerald has talked about playing these songs live and reaching the live proficiency of artists like Caribou, an exciting prospect—it's easy to imagine the bulk of Fading Love blooming into something more cathartic and immediately engaging. But even in this basic state, the album is a complete statement that's comfortable in its own skin.


The American photographer reflects on the past with a collection of warm, intimate piano compositions influenced by traditional folk and gospel.

512

William Eggleston’s music, like his photography, lives in vivid color. The 84-year-old artist helped establish color photography as a medium worthy of institutional attention, elevating what was once considered purely commercial to the level of serious art. His photos are shot quickly, yet retain an honest, lived-in quality—in part thanks to his longstanding preoccupation with domestic interiors, aloof inlaws, personal trinkets, and other eccentricities of the American South. Roving and somewhat stiff, his 2017 album Musik unearthed a side of the photographer’s life once relegated to footnote status, compiling decades-old recordings captured on a Korg OW/1 FD Pro synthesizer. 512, Eggleston’s newly recorded follow-up, features warmer and more spacious improvisational piano compositions with an intimate, wide-eyed charm.
The album takes its name from the unit number for Eggleston’s Memphis apartment, where it was recorded, and the music itself has a loose, domestic feel. A gentle brush of incidental noise in the opening moments of “Improvisation” places Eggleston at the piano bench, muttering under his breath before he’s joined by Brian Eno on bells. Eno’s touches are light and restrained, distinctly secondary to the tense stabs from Eggleston. The recordings have some continuity with the modernist lineage of jazz, or perhaps minimalism by way of Eno, but are more strongly influenced by the traditional folk and gospel music played on upright pianos across the U.S. for so much of the nation’s early history. The result is delightfully anachronistic and full of life.
The record’s liveliness is partly thanks to choices made by producer Tom Lunt, who joined Eggleston in Memphis for the recording sessions. As both co-founder of the Numero Group and the archivist responsible for breathing new life into Eggleston’s earlier material, Lunt has a deep understanding of tradition. He invited session musicians like Sam Amidon, Matana Roberts, and Leo Abrahams to perform on the record, each adding subtle flourishes. “Ol’ Man River” is stoic and melancholy, with rolling fiddle and banjo lines from Amidon. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” achieves a similar depth of feeling by way of Roberts’ rich saxophone, which peek through in the piece’s softest moments.
While “Improvisation” and “That’s Some Robert Burns” are both original compositions, the album’s other four tracks are all American songbook standards. “Ol’ Man River,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and “Over the Rainbow” all began life as sentimental show tunes, while “Onward Christian Soldiers” is an Anglican hymn that dates back to the mid-19th century. This distinction is, however, ultimately of little consequence for Eggleston, who strays away from anything resembling convention with his improvisations. “Onward Christian Soldiers” moves from pulsing minimalism to discordant jazz and back again, while “Over the Rainbow” leans into the delicate “soft pedal” technique so closely associated with Harold Budd. But where Budd uses the technique to achieve an icy distance on Eno-assisted albums like The Pearl, Eggleston’s playing is strikingly present, with a pastoral glow.
So much about the world has changed since Eggleston first took up the piano, his “first calling” before the camera, in the early 1940s. Where his earlier archival recordings can feel rote and mechanical, like a bit of idle rehearsal time, 512 shows Eggleston reinterpreting his own past and the Southern musical traditions he grew up with. Much like his photographs, which once felt outrageously ordinary, his music provides a snapshot of the changing conditions of his life. 512 looks back with a full-hearted delight.


Texas duo's debut album blends doo-wop, British folk, and garage rock with the group's arch sense of humor.

Unlearn

Fergus & Geronimo take their name from the rival youth factions in the 1994 Irish film War of the Buttons. It's a choice of nomenclature that fits indie's recent obsession with childhood and nostalgia, as does the album cover art. Yet when you open the CD edition of Unlearn, you're greeted with the following message printed on the disc: "You still buy CDs?"
That arch, slightly confrontational humor extended to their performance at the 2010 CMJ showcase hosted by fellow Texan, blogger Gorilla vs. Bear. F&G were in full snark mode, sarcastically toasting the event's sponsors (and the blog conglomerates that love them), jibing at trust-fund Brooklyn man-babies, and (in the case of one member) wearing a "Free O.J. Simpson" t-shirt. This sense of dismissal carries over to Unlearn, where the band fires shots at neo-crunch yuppies ("Where the Walls Are Made of Grass"), baby boomers (the appropriately titled "Baby Boomer/Could You Deliver"), and music critics ("Wanna Know What I Would Do?").
All in all, they're pretty fucking funny when they want to be, but this isn't so much "joke music" as "music with jokes." Kelly and Savage claim inspiration from Sparks, another duo with arch humor and serious chops. While there are precious few glam-rock moves involved with F&G, the connection to the brothers Mael holds some spiritual water. Whereas Sparks tended to shift melodic motifs within songs like a Rube Goldberg contraption, Kelly and Savage refuse to stay stylistically still throughout Unlearn, drawing from doo-wop, British folk, garage rock, and the easy jangle of the Who's less incendiary moments.
If it all sounds like a little much, that's because it kind of is-- don't come to this record expecting cohesion or form; you're not going to find much of it here. It's worth charging through Unlearn's varied territory, though, for the smoldering strummer "Forced Aloha", as well as the closing track, in which vocalist Elyse Shrock testifies in spoken word over a warm, 1950s pop song structure about rebelling against authority and refusing to "[bow] to their cross." It's a clever move to couch such countercultural statements within a musical template known for buttoned-up formalism. But its deeper appeal is that it's earwormy enough to take a casual listener multiple go-rounds to pick up on that.


Del tha Funkee Homosapien has, for years, been widely regarded as King of the Oddball Rappers. On Deltron 3030, he unravels an album-length narrative about the titular year, in which he's a superhero named Deltron Zero.

Deltron 3030

Del tha Funkee Homosapien has, for years, been widely regarded as King of the Oddball Rappers. Lugging the backpack long before there was a codified arty hip-hop scene, Del sneaked onto the radio, clinging by his fingernails to cousin Ice Cube's Chuck Taylor strings. Of course, even his hard-rock relative was befuddled by the Sapien's giddy spirals of abstract, meaningless verbiage. "Del," queried Cube on his oddball cuz's debut, "What the fuck is a Funkee Homosapien?"
What the fuck, indeed. Del was never shy when it came to flaunting his restless MC intellect, favoring elaborate puns and encyclopedic vocabulary over, like, meaning. The classic example of this, naturally, is Del's first single, 1991's "Mistadobalina." The track served as a lengthy put-down on some guy named Mr. Bob Dobalina, about whom very little was clear except that Del found him a little silly.
Del has always seemed irritated at having to address the real world, and as such, his best verses are completely divorced from it. For the most part, his last few albums have kept things defiantly surreal, which is great fun, but also chafes the listener. Surely, a lyricist with Del's heavy-duty intelligence has interesting thoughts to share about something other than how cool he and his friends are. It seemed we'd never know... until now.
Paired with the Automator, the Kool Keith-embraced-and-scorned poet laureate of creepy, oppressive beats, Del has finally sent himself where he belonged to begin with: outer space. On Deltron 3030, he unravels an album-length narrative about the titular year, in which he's a superhero named Deltron Zero (a plot not entirely dissimilar from that of RZA's Bobby Digital). Armed with his two sidekicks, the Automator (here saddled with the unfortunate sobriquet "The Cantankerous Captain Aptos") and scratch mastermind Kid Koala (aka "Skiznod the Boy Wonder"), Deltron-Z combs the galaxy, supporting his secretive Earthling existence by participating in weird rap battles where one's rhymes summon psychic powers that physically damage the opponent.
At least, that's what may be going on. Like most hip-hoperas, there's not much stock placed in narrative coherence here. Fortunately, the plot setup-- delivered by a deliciously, almost impossibly bored-sounding Damon Albarn-- gives way to a loose set of ruminations on a myriad of subjects. Of course, the rap-battle set pieces afford Del plenty of time to lavish attention to his favorite subject: how cool he is in relation to you and any poor soul who would dare challenge his verbal supremacy.
But, allowed room to imagine a whole world, many of Deltron 3030's most impressive tracks show our hero exploring a wide-ranging variety of surprisingly weighty topics. The future is imagined from the bottom up: Del lives in a secret lair in the Bay Area, unbothered by exorbitant rents while the world around him falls to pieces. The Earth is run by a select, superwealthy oligarchy who have consigned the underclasses to rot away. (Yes, this is the future.) The environment's in ruins, there's fighting in the streets, and Paul Barman gets a speaking role. In short, things are in bad shape.
Such dire straits reveal Del as a surprisingly acute social critic. He even lacks a New York protest MC's frustrating tendency towards self-righteousness, instead favoring targets that actually deserve his wrath: he wants to destroy corporate control and "convert them to papyrus," mostly, and his oppressed underclass is racially diverse. Like the man says, "It's not about separation/ It's about the population." He resents the appropriation of hip-hop, but not necessarily by palefaces. He just doesn't like biters because they're messing with the genre's chances of being taken seriously.
In the end, that's the most exciting thing about Deltron 3030. Though never self-satisfied or deliberately obscure, the record is an infinite improvement over the wanky verbal gymnastics that currently crowd smug, jerk-off rappers' 12-inches. Though Del may have helped start that trend, here he aches to say something significant. In places-- like the sad, almost Gothic "Madness," the album's masterful centerpiece-- he even succeeds. Now liberated from the obnoxious demands of everyday reality, he's finally found a way to say something meaningful about it.


Cory Branan’s latest set of countrified rock tunes may be his best to date. Branan sounds like he’s finally found the right balance between audacity and subtlety, between humor and heartbreak.

Adios

About two and a half minutes into “Blacksburg,” off his fifth solo record, Cory Branan pauses his countrified classic rock tune for a solo from what sounds like bagpipes, a saxophone, and/or fuzzed-out Flying V power chords. Constantly shape-shifting, it sounds like a parody of white guys making fist-pumping music about feelings: a big moment undercut by its own purposeful self-awareness yet somehow made even bigger by its own self-deprecation. The song itself is about a woman with big dreams stuck in a small town; Branan rhymes “emptying rounds in dark bars” with “getting around in a parked car.” He sounds impressed with her decisiveness and daring, the way she risks becoming the subject of local gossip to inject her life with something like a thrill. If that summons forth too many bad memories of bros singing about fantasy women (the alpha monkey in this dubious genre is Train’s “Meet Virginia”), that strangely hilarious solo allows the song to avoid condescension and let the character breathe.
Branan is smarter and wilier than the singer-songwriter genre typically allows and more intellectual than he’d probably admit. He started barking out his songs in Memphis around the turn of the century, and after two albums on local indie Madjack Records, he moved to Nashville and took forever to write his third and fourth albums, which revealed an easily distracted musical mind and a weakness for confusing cleverness for substance. At times his self-awareness sounded suspiciously similar to self-absorption: Does anyone really want to hear a song about your floundering career called “The No Hit Wonder”?
Adios is possibly his best album to date—it’s certainly his most musically imaginative and arguably his wisest. “Don’t ask me how I even got here,” he sings on the rollicking opener “I Only Know,” before Laura Jane Grace joins him on the chorus: “I only know I ain’t gonna go back.” Rather than aim for the punk assertion of Against Me!, the song recalls the candy-sweet catchiness of Buddy Holly and serves as a short (not two minutes long) overture for the album, establishing its themes if not its sound. Branan is all over the map, veering from the swamp rock of “Walls, MS” to the synth-driven pop of “Visiting Hours” to the country crooning of “Cold Blue Moonlight.”
The album’s greatest detriment, consequently, is its length: At 14 tracks, it meanders, occasionally lags, and indulges far too many tangents and jarring transitions. But Heartbreaker is just as long, so that’s only a minor complaint. Ryan Adams may be the obvious point of comparison for a singer-songwriter in his early forties who loves classic rock as much as classic country and probably has a soft spot for classic metal, too. Branan is funnier and more disciplined as a songwriter, which may be why he’s not as popular. Adios is a good place to start because it’s an album animated by a compelling personal backstory: the death of Branan’s father, the birth of his son, and his relocation from Nashville to Memphis.
With its gently finger-picked guitar theme and two-step drumbeat, “The Vow” could have been just another country song about fathers and sons, but the details are so carefully sketched out and so specific that it feels fresh and affecting. That second verse in particular—in which he considers the implications of the phrase “That’s what you get for thinking”—is Branan at his best, taking something familiar and finding new dimensions in it. All the while, he sounds like he’s just thinking out loud. “I remember thinking, ‘That’s probably not the best lesson for a kid,’” Branan sings. “And although that was just something he said… I get to thinking there may have been some kind of genius in the effortless way he just did.”
“Don’t Go” traces a pair of lover from World War II through the end of their lives, but avoids Greatest Generation sanctimony by indulging his storytelling chops. He tosses off a line like, “Shame about your curfew, I would have liked to have the chance just to kiss you into 1941,” before following the couple right up to their recent deaths. When the horns come in on the bridge, there’s no irony in the music—just a funeral march for two people you feel like you’ve known your whole life. It’s a crushing thematic finale. At the risk of sounding clever myself, Adios sounds more like Hola. Nearly 15 years into his career, Branan sounds like he’s finally found the right balance between audacity and subtlety, between humor and heartbreak.


The Canadian DJ’s most polished solo release yet is an album of catchy, globe-trotting pop that showcases his talents as a songwriter, producer and curator.

Elsewhere

The music video for Ryan Hemsworth’s “Special Girl” features a couple dancing their way through a militaristic beauty school on the outskirts of Shanghai—you might compare it to the video for Britney Spears’ “...Baby One More Time” but with Chinese military uniforms. Perhaps even stranger than the video’s premise is the story of how it came about. Documentary filmmaker Noah Sheldon and his 7-year-old daughter happened upon the Canadian producer in a cafe in Tokyo last December and decided to strike up a conversation. Neither man was familiar with the other’s work but Hemsworth expressed an interest in Sheldon’s latest project, a documentary about the beauty school and its disciplinarian founder. When Sheldon approached Hemsworth with the idea to shoot a choreographed video at the school, he jumped at the opportunity.
This story says a lot about Hemsworth’s attitude towards his craft: open-minded, approachable, and highly collaborative. Long before he achieved jet-setting DJ status, he was using social media to unearth micro-scenes and work with emerging artists on the other side of the globe. But while this curiosity has provided ample grist for Hemsworth’s DJ sets and the Secret Songs label, something has always felt missing from his solo albums. His original material has often felt hemmed in by Hemsworth’s songwriting, which tends toward singer-songwriter introspection that lacks range and depth. With his third solo album, Elsewhere, Hemsworth abandons this sadboy stance almost entirely. Alongside an international cast of collaborators who draw from genres like UK Afrobeats, dancehall, and R&B, Hemsworth infuses these songs with warmth, energy, and a sense of ecstatic joy. Much like with Drake’s recent foray into world music, these sunny hues fit Hemsworth surprisingly well.
Take opener, “This Feeling,” which layers whimsical touches of percussion atop the sort of deep funk groove characteristic of a Kaytranada record. The end result is unapologetic in its ambition to move bodies; it’s music built for dancefloors, not headphones. Both the nocturnal R&B number “Sade” and the wooly pop of “Lagoons” soften the edges of Hemsworth’s typically crisp sound. “Special Girl” and “Beep Beep” draw from a bright palette of marimbas, dancehall melodies, and layers of interlocking percussion. The former is a sublime tropical pop song while on the latter, Atlanta rapper B La B and rapper/singer K4mo stack bubbly rhymes atop drums that clink like glasses. “Beep beep, I’m like ‘Whoa now’/Feet up at your ho house,” B La B playfully jabs; it sounds like he and all parties involved are having a blast.
Hemsworth has a tendency to rethink his sound from album to album, moving from the gameboy symphonies of Guilt Trips to the wintry laptop music of Alone for the First Time to the colorful dance-pop of Elsewhere. Hemsworth does look back here on the closing track “Animal,” revisiting the cold, atmospheric sound of Alone, but it actually feels ambitious now. Hemsworth's chiming, airy instrumental glimmers in the afternoon sun while Robin Dann of jazz-pop band Bernice delivers vocals, which culminate in a cascade of gorgeous three-part harmonies. After a false ending, the song’s elements are reconfigured in a second movement that would feel right at home on a Sigur Rós song, string crescendo and all. Where similar tracks on Alone for the First Time scratched the surface of feelings like loneliness and longing, “Animal” feels rich and nuanced—it’s one of the most refined songs to bear Hemsworth’s name yet.
Elsewhere may suggest a new direction, but its ethos is still wholly Hemsworthian. Though he has collaborated with high-profile artists like E-40, Tinashe, Tory Lanez, and Mitski, all of Elsewhere’s features are from relative unknowns: an experimental producer from Tokyo, a British-Nigerian Afrobeats singer, a playfully melodic rapper from Atlanta via Queens. Where Hemsworth’s previous solo albums were anchored—or, occasionally, weighed down—by his own approach to songwriting, here, he places more trust in his curatorial instincts, following his guests in a number of fruitful directions. Hemsworth has found his way back to where he thrives.


There's a crash and a scream, and the groaning sound of a warship come to rape the harbor: That ...

The Decemberists: Her Majesty The Decemberists

Her Majesty The Decemberists

There's a crash and a scream, and the groaning sound of a warship come to rape the harbor: That's right, The Decemberists have another song about pirates. "Tell your daughters do not walk the streets alone tonight!" cries Colin Meloy with nasal urgency, and the band gives it more drama than ever before, lunging into an aesthetic that's half Dickens, half 1950s adventure comic book. You can almost smell the mothballs on their costumes. They don't care that some listeners won't even make it past this song, or that some people don't want to hear a pirate story no matter how well it's told.
The Decemberists may never escape the label "quirky," which is a crime: Whatever the style, Colin Meloy's songwriting makes this band one of the strongest working today. His melodies are so perfect and his words so substantial that it reminds you how much slack you cut most other bands. Too many singers mumble or screech as if they didn't trust or care about their words: Meloy declares his lyrics, lets his work live or die by them, and sets them deep in masterful pop surroundings.
The band's confidence actually makes Her Majesty The Decemberists less accessible than their other releases. Their earliest material, on the 5 Songs EP, didn't stray far from acoustic alt-country, but their first full-length, Castaways and Cutouts-- which many people discovered only a few months ago, thanks to its reissue on Kill Rock Stars-- was a revelation, sometimes brilliant and sometimes a beautiful accident. Its dreamy tone erred on the side of melancholy; by contrast, Her Majesty veers toward the theatrical as Meloy steps up the role-playing and tells more intricate stories.
On "Shanty for the Arethusa" and "The Chimbley Sweep", the band marches aggressively past the just-skilled-enough playing of their other albums, sounding like a version of The Coral that's twice as smart (and half as loud). The horns, strings and keys they've brought in this time sweeten the production, and they nail the upbeat Britpop arrangement on "Billy Liar", a song about a dull summer break that has what sounds like a lovestruck chorus. There's also romance in "A Soldiering Life", a homoerotic ode to the military. It's winningly clever, and even if it's not the deepest song in their repertoire, you have to credit Meloy's enthusiasm when he practically drools the word "stevedore." It's just one display of the surgical precision of Meloy's lyrics, along with the taut ballad "Red Right Ankle", or the rich imagery of "Bachelor and the Bride".
But what's most intriguing about Meloy's style isn't his erudition or kitsch; it's the strange tension he creates by mashing both qualities together. "Los Angeles I'm Yours" sounds odd not just because he matches the disgusted lyrics with a breezy tune, but because he throws old-fashioned, florid language-- references to "orphans and oligarchs" and taunts like "I can see your undies"-- against post-modern Los Angeles. And in "Red Right Ankle", he alternates between a metaphorical and anatomical use of the word "heart." Describing a girl's suitors, he sings, "Some had crawled their way into your heart/ To rend your ventricles apart." We know Meloy can slop through pirate gore in one song and write poetry in the next, but it's more interesting to hear how easily he can do both-- and how willfully he'll do either.
As they've become bolder, The Decemberists have lost some of the uncertain dreaminess of the best songs on Castaways-- say, "Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect" or "Grace Cathedral Hill". But Castaways' near-transcendent finale, "California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade", is matched here by "I Was Meant for the Stage", where Meloy doesn't just state his ambitions, but stands at the front of the crowd and waits for the tomatoes to fly. Maybe from here they'll become an esoteric cult band, or maybe they'll just keep getting better: Either way, The Decemberists have already established themselves so thoroughly that I was able to make it through an entire review without comparing them to Neutral Milk Hotel or namechecking Edward Gorey. They're an unclassifiable American original, and they could turn out to be one of our best.


The two students of J Dilla consolidate their skills to create a free-spirited project around joy and fellowship, with a few meandering moments.

FlySiifu’s

Fly Anakin and Pink Siifu share a commitment to community. Fly Anakin, a member of Richmond, Virginia rap collective Mutant Academy, moves with an official unit. Pink Siifu, a wanderer with roots in Cincinnati, Birmingham, and Los Angeles, lacks a formal affiliation, but he’s a fixture of multiple scenes. On FlySiifu’s, the two toast to their support networks and merge them into a village of music enthusiasts and free spirits. The record has the feel of a summer cookout in the park, joy and fellowship flowing freely, friends coming and going.
Set in a record shop that’s named after the rappers but not owned by them, FlySiifu’s follows a day in the life of two languid store clerks. Part Next Friday, part Clerks, the album is stuffed with goofy interludes and skits where customers call the shop and leave angry and yearning voicemails. MadLib, who provides the dusty, hollowed-out beat on “Time Up,” and J Dilla are clear influences. (One customer requests a copy of Welcome 2 Detroit.) There are few choruses, and the pair rarely trade lines or thread their verses together, but their styles have subtle chemistry. Fly Anakin is a showman, streaking through beats with slick, nimble flows, while Pink Siifu is the shaman, his rapping hushed and anxious like prayer. Together they make songs that are heavy yet light, bleak yet resilient.

The production style ranges from dreamy chopped loops with crisp drums to soupy mixes with dollops of texture. Jay Versace’s ghostly piano sample on “Mind Right” leads to verses laced with defiance and dread. Twinkly tracks “Clean” and “Runthafade,” both produced by Lastnamedavid, are breezy and leisurely, yielding full-throated boasts and punchlines. “I’m gold like C-3/Mother fuck a P.O.,” Pink Siifu says, on the former. Fly Anakin follows his lead, repping Richmond: “Divide the James River when I start to practice on the weekend/I hopped the fence and peeked in/My opulence precedes ’em.”
The highlights are the moments when they lean into the contrasts between their styles and voices. “Spades’” is split down the middle between flash and shadow, Fly Anakin swishing around internal rhymes and colorful threats with the precision of Cam’ron: “You know you owe us, nigga/Cold fish pushing boulders, nigga/Focus got you open/Now you loc’in/Bitch you bogus,” he raps. When Pink Siifu takes the reins, the song turns existential: “What more can I say?/How much can I say?/Who can I pray for?/So much to pay for/We find a way.” Both verses address betrayal but come to different conclusions, Pink Siifu offering redemption to Fly Anakin’s retribution. It almost feels like a debate.
Between the skits, the freeform song structures, and the length, FlySiifu’s is a bit too meandering, rarely tapping into the fusionism the title implies or playing up Pink Siifu and Fly Anakin’s differences. But the bond between the artists is clear, as is the resonance between their communities of rappers, producers, and singers. Though they don’t bridge new worlds or sounds here, they confirm the implicit connections between their formative muses, threading the outré time signatures of J Dilla and Madlib, the spiritualism of Dungeon Family, and the flair of Dipset into a cozy tapestry. It’s not groundbreaking, but it is home.

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Prelapsarian is the most compact of the New York-based metal band's albums. On these dense thirty-five minutes, they have both feet planted on terra firma and are racing against the doomsday clock.

Prelapsarian

Eight years, five albums, and two EPs in, the New York-based outfit Krallice have long since shut up purists about their “hipster black metal.” Their four-man, post-structural assembly line runs at a breakneck pace, taking great care to balance the intricate (Colin Marston and Mick Barr’s interlocking riffs, Lev Weinstein’s head-spinning polyrhythms) with the incendiary (best exemplified by Barr and Nick McMaster’s shared, animalistic vocal duties; the former’s a screaming eagle, the latter a growling hellhound). The quartet frequently capitalize on the element of surprise; Krallice’s last two releases—2015’s Ygg Huur and last winter’s Hyperion EP—dropped spontaneously, a pair of inter-dimensional rifts masquerading as albums, far from the hum of the hype machine. Early last month, the band opened the portal once more to announce their sixth album Prelapsarian, subsequently released sans fanfare on the Winter Solstice.
Upon first glance, Prelapsarian, which the band recorded last summer, may not seem like much. Comprising four tracks and thirty-five minutes, the LP stands just a smidge taller than its predecessor, and sports a similarly dense stylistic template. Fans familiar with the stop-go surges and antiphonal touches of old will undoubtedly appreciate “Transformation Chronicles,” “Conflagration”, and “Lotus Throne,” the album’s staggered, epic triad.
Hyperion’s copious lyrical references to mythology, astrophysics, and nihilistic philosophy belied an obsession with the cosmic. Prelapsarian, by contrast, is the product of a band firmly planted on terra firma, racing against the doomsday clock. Post-election anxiety runs rampant, manifested in everything from the title (derived from the age of humanity’s primordial, Edenic innocence, the original “good old days” before Adam and Eve shared a snack and sealed humanity’s grim fate), to the razed-earth panoramas framing the doomy, eight-minute-long dirge “Conflagration.”
“Hate Power,” is the the album’s highlight: an odd apex, considering it’s only the second track on the album, and clocking in at less than four minutes, the shortest. Krallice songs usually sprawl out across nine, eleven minutes; in these cramped confines, Barr and McMaster stage an epic battle for control as the band totters between d-beat and death metal. Without their usual song length as a cushion, the song feels like a fight to the death in a windowless room. As the song thrashes itself nearly apart, the doomsday-clock ticking desperation is palpable. In their growing catalog, this is a relatively crisp release, a speedy little roller coaster situated alongside the Towers of Terror. But the moment is dense and terrifying enough to make Krallice fans wonder: What could they accomplish with an album of compositions this compact?


The Ramallah producer-rapper’s debut is a border-agnostic collection of beats that participates in a global dialogue while retaining a distinctly Palestinian identity.

Tuqoos

In 2018, Boiler Room threw its first-ever party in Ramallah, Palestine. On top of broadcasting the West Bank city’s small but fiercely creative electronic music scene to a worldwide audience, the party gave local DJs an opportunity to play for a local crowd—something Palestinians can’t always take for granted. A lack of venues and a midnight music curfew means the Palestinian scene is largely concentrated on parties at houses or restaurants, and the complex system of permits required by the Israeli occupation to travel in and out of the West Bank makes performing across the wall in Jaffa or Haifa near impossible for many artists. Palestine Underground, a documentary released by Boiler Room in tandem with the event, opens with Ramallah DJ ODDZ climbing over a 26-foot-wall to reach a gig in Jaffa. “I hurt my leg,” he says, limping, “but yeah, worth it.”
Among those booked to play the Ramallah party was Julmud, who—along with his mentor Muqata’a (the “godfather” of Palestinian hip-hop) and the Saleb Wahad crew he rolls with—is making some of the most fascinating and outré instrumental hip-hop since Brainfeeder first blew stoners’ minds in the late ’00s. Tuqoos, his debut for Muqata’a’s Bilna’es label, is a wildly imaginative, border-agnostic collection of beats that carries on a global dialogue while retaining a distinctly Palestinian identity. It is the product of a relentless curiosity, and of musical ideas vaulting easily over the physical and legal barriers separating the people of the West Bank from the rest of the world.
In many ways, Tuqoos evokes Donuts, the early Brainfeeder catalog, and other cornerstones of instrumental hip-hop. The tracks are short, the beats lurch, and sumptuous strings sweep across the stereo field; the overall impression is of a flowing tapestry rather than a sequence of songs. Yet Julmud’s rhythmic sensibility reaches far beyond hip-hop, drawing from jungle (“Juwway”), Afro-Portuguese club music (“Kassara”), juke (“Basmala”), and vaporwave (“Saree’ el thawaban” and “Kalma’”). The album unburdens itself at its very end into “Ur,” a short, finger-picked folk sketch that seems beamed in from the distant past. Listen to “Ur” and start the album over at “Basmala” to get a sense of how far Julmud takes us in just 37 minutes.
Though you could imagine Julmud and crew bobbing their heads to this stuff in the smoke-filled Saleb Wahad studio, Tuqoos does a fine job of balancing its dragging headshop atmosphere with the “aggressive” quality Muqata’a considers inherent to the sound of Palestinian hip-hop. Julmud loves distortion, and “Falnukmel” balances his barbed, hoarse-throated bars (Saleb Wahad makes a point of using Ramallah slang in its verses) with what sounds like scaffolding falling apart in slow motion behind him. “Kassara” is even more abrasive, treating its frantic polyrhythms with a pall of distortion. Yet Tuqoos never slips in balancing its more vibe-friendly stretches with its moments of urgency. They weave in and out of each other inseparably, reminding us how hard-earned this album’s sense of joy, freedom, and discovery really is.


The 22-year-old Queens rapper offers a tape of thoughtful and weighty heartbreak hymns that slowly reveal more of his layered personality.

Pretty Face

Back in high school, in an attempt to one-up a friend who was hitting on a girl they both liked, Deem Spencer recited an Asher Roth song to draw her attention. When it worked, he started writing his own raps to avoid being found out. He’s still rapping to girls—sort of. His first full-length project, Pretty Face, is full of (and about) similar performative gestures for a lover and about how such gestures have proven futile. The tracklist, when pieced together as a sentence, is a lyric played in the tape’s opening seconds: “Really, I been tryna tell shorty how beautiful shorty is to me but shorty not tryna hear it from me.” For 34 minutes he tries—and ultimately fails—to salvage an unraveled relationship, but in the process, he gives more shape to his beautiful, muted music.
Spencer, a mousy 22-year-old rapper from Jamaica Queens who coos his lyrics, makes music for the overthinkers. There aren’t any traces of the historic Queens of hip-hop yore in the verses he intones. He’s blissfully unconcerned with NYC rap lore and restoring the feeling. Picking out his raps can be like catching conversation fragments from someone just barely within earshot, beneath the buzzing murmur in a restaurant. His songs exist in the cracks between the mundane and profound, ruminating on—sometimes through—the everyday struggles of being young and moving forward. He is in search of both the perfectly articulated thought and feeling. “You gotta be more expressive than you are impressive,” he said last year. Oddly enough, expressiveness has been a problem for the hopeless romantic. His small voice, often obscured to the point of being indistinct in song, has a tendency to be swallowed up in his big ideas. Pretty Face is a rectification, not so much in volume as in the sheer impact of sonic material. Even when his voice is nearly imperceptible here his presence is still palpable.
Recorded in his bedroom “on some depressed shit” in 2018 and personally categorized as the music he made when he didn’t want to make music, Pretty Face plays like Deem Spencer’s meandering revelations amid an undirected recording process. It’s heartbreak hymns for pensive extroverts. The tape builds on the electro-soul blended minimalism of his previous work toward fuller songs. It hits differently. Ironically, these incidental cuts develop with more purpose. Before, when he would disappear into the mix, it felt like he was hiding; now, it feels like an invitation to listen more carefully, to come in closer.
His last project, the 2017 EP we think we alone, waded through the fog of grief after the death of his grandfather. Those eight songs were at turns introspective and droll, with the capacity to be even more, but they were also usually withdrawn or shrinking. All his songs paint with a glass-half-empty perspective, but where his last project felt incomplete in almost a fatalistic way these are a bit more configured. Spencer recently revealed that both sunflower and we think we alone were originally meant to be called Pretty Face, but that he kept saving the title for greener pastures. This Pretty Face, though still not released under light circumstances, doesn’t feel as undone.
When a beat breaks off to reveal another, as on the bubbly “shorty pt. 3,” it feels like a decision made with resolution in mind. Several thoughts peek from underneath the overcast conditions to reveal the restorative light of atonement, taking responsibility for the self-sabotaging role he’s played in his own misfortune: “I still feel like coulda, shoulda, wouldn’t/Had burned bridges so I couldn’t be followed,” he sighs on “is.” The bending flows on “been” are among his most potent, the impetus for a conversation with the “girl’s God” on why “we all can’t love her.” What unfolds next is illuminating: “And as a watched, he grew with anger/He said, ‘I’d expect such hate from a scorned ex-lover, but not from you, a stranger’/I said, ‘Nah, it ain’t even hate, my brother, not for you, it’s thanks/And I’ma make sure I collect all these cold hard gems that I got from you in banks.’” Not only is Spencer finding relief on the tape, he is treasuring the experience.
From the jazz lounge vibes of “but” to the slick spitting on “not tryna hear it,” Deem Spencer turns a tumultuous romance into kindling for a bonfire of self-realization. The songs on Pretty Face aren’t so much about what happens inside a broken relationship as they are what happens after. Through the heartache, Spencer stumbled into a truer sense of identity in his music. When the hurt subsides, all you can do is go on.


Grim, grey, and dour, the Canadian band’s fourth album offers a bleak look at the world and delivers some new textures but lacks some of the musical tension to really create sparks.

Arrangements

Preoccupations possess the kind of cynicism indulged by a self-serious and self-selecting crowd, the ones who notice society’s inexorable march toward the apocalypse and put on some wiry post-punk to watch it burn. The quartet hasn’t changed the message much on Arrangements, their least severely-named Preoccupations album after two self-titleds and 2018’s New Material. And Matthew Flegel is no more specific than his past doomsaying when he sneers, “Everything tastes like the bitter end” on “Ricochet.” Only now, he’s gesturing to an endless amount of recent natural and manmade horrors that can be called upon to fill in the blanks. Preoccupations’ bunker mentality now seems pretty reasonable.
In explaining the thematic thrust of Arrangements, Flegel joked, “It’s basically about the world blowing up and no one giving a shit.” There are two possible interpretations of this statement—if we’re to take Preoccupations at their word—or at least the militant marching orders they’ve maintained since they went by Viet Cong—the world is blowing up and people should give a shit. But it’s increasingly likely that Preoccupations see our inevitable extinction as the natural order of things, so why fight it? “It’s alright, we can celebrate/The evaporating homo sapien race/That’s racing to erase its brief/And glorious existence,” Flegel huffs in a breathless cadence on the opening “Fix Bayonets!” Note the exclamation point in the title—when was it ever in this band’s nature to be emphatic? But “Fix Bayonets!” convincingly recasts Preoccupations as the house band for a party at ground zero.
This renewed vigor carries over to “Ricochet,” which attempts to unite the streamlined melodies of their most recent work and the grim world-weariness of their best work. There’s always been an element of jangle serving as the sole wisp of color in Preoccupations’ otherwise slab-gray palette, and “Ricochet” unkinks those wire-cleaner guitar figures to imagine Joy Division sticking around long enough to absorb R.E.M.’s take on post-punk. Even at their most accessible, Preoccupations could once only suggest the scope of their reach as a gothic pop band. But on “Ricochet,” Flegel allows himself to get caught up in this bold, brighter presentation, delivering the chorus with a chesty brio, sounding more like a Cruel World headliner than a scrappy indie rock band self-releasing their fourth album. Yet the chorus itself turns anticlimactic, its words feeling like placeholders, misaligned with the ensuing cascade of Mad Max imagery.
Preoccupations thrive in a state of resistance—Flegel’s vocals pushing against juddering, atypical rhythms, Mike Wallace’s drums slathered in icy reverb like he’s trying to punch his way out of a meat locker. The sound of struggle is the sound of engagement for Preoccupations, and so when the band sounds like interlocking, grinding cogs in a rusted war machine on “Death of Melody,” it conveys a greater sense of urgency than any of Flegel’s sincere scaremongering about climate change. Similarly, the synth swells during the first half of “Provider” seem like they’re second-guessing their unorthodox, intriguing tonal clusters, requiring an entirely new set of adjectives for Preoccupations: psychedelic, sultry even. But halfway through, the band shifts to a more standard-issue beat, ultimately denying Flegel’s most impassioned vocal performance the dramatic backing it demands. “Recalibrate” and “Tearing Up the Grass” also toy around with kernels of interesting textures and imagery without creating dynamics that justify the two taking up about a third of Arrangement’s run time. What might be considered a groove more often sounds like a rut.
But perhaps the greater issue lies less with the lack of tension between the four instrumentalists of Preoccupations—once again, there’s the post-2020 caveat that much of Arrangements was created remotely. Rather, while Preoccupations’ message remains honest and earnest, it doesn’t create enough friction to cause a spark. “They’re selling T-shirts at this crucifixion” is a vivid, albeit somewhat trite image, appealing in a sort of Anti-Flag way. Otherwise, we’re in a race to the bottom, the “mediocracy” is ruling the world and there’s little to suggest that anyone predisposed to this sort of music wouldn’t already agree. In fact, Arrangements is so in tune with the current moment that verges on ambient—“I don’t believe that we’ll disappear/If we can’t consistently prove we’re here,” Flegel sings with unintended irony on “Ricochet.” People in persistently foul moods need “mood music” too.


Anna Calvi's new One Breath is a shade darker and angrier than its precursor, alternately haunting and just a bit more disarming than you’d expect. However, the quickly recorded release is too disparate in spots.

One Breath

Anna Calvi is a bit difficult to place among her peers. The art-rock experiment that was Anna Calvi was much-feted by the British awards press, adopted by the Paris fashion scene and surprisingly robust in sales but had neither the broad appeal of Adele nor the tasteful artiness of James Blake or pre-established icon status of PJ Harvey, the Mercury Prize co-nominees closest to her league. Calvi has much more in common with debuts like Jesca Hoop’s Kismet, Bat for Lashes’ Fur and Gold or Society of Imaginary Friends’ Sadness is a Bridge to Love: a classically trained artist (Calvi studied guitar and violin at university for years before her solo career) with big-name fans (Calvi's include Nick Cave and Brian Eno), Calvi is an artist whose sound and influences are theatrical in the sweeping, near-operatic sense and whose arrangements are dense and knotty and take time to unfurl.
One Breath, Calvi’s follow-up recorded in six weeks in France, is far from a departure. Calvi switches producers from Harvey associate Rob Ellis to John Congleton, a prolific producer among alt-folk types like Shearwater, Sarah Jaffe and especially St. Vincent, who worked with him on Actor and Strange Mercy, but the sound is still Calvi: alternately haunting, like a lost noir theme, or just a bit more disarming than you’d expect. The album’s heavier on the latter, being a shade darker and angrier than its precursor, the product of a tumultuous year. (Calvi is far more vulnerable in music than in interviews; she’s cited the death of a loved one as an inspiration for One Breath, but either sidesteps or dismisses any other further explanations journalists have offered up.) “It’s… very thrilling to feel you're out of control and don't know what's going to happen, but it’s also scary,” Calvi told The Observer recently. Hence the title track, which sprawls like a minute in slow motion. Calvi sings barely above a breath: “I’ve got one, one second to live/ before I say what I’ve got to say,” then gives the track first to distortion, then to an orchestral finale that materializes out of it. It’s the sort of subtle structure, plotted like a film—Calvi has mentioned writing her songs in such a manner—that’s easy to miss but rewarding if you don’t.
This isn’t to say One Breath is a subtle album; in fact, it’s best when it’s not. The meticulous “Piece By Piece” is impressive in a methodical way, as it runs through indignant guitar solos, then muted synth lines, then bursting, romantic strings, like unraveling a relationship in reverse. It’s easier still to admire the late-album sequence of the grungy “Love of My Life", where Calvi works herself up then catches her breath, then “Carry Me Over", a five-and-a-half-minute, largely instrumental composition that’s a showcase for all Calvi’s training: anxious marimba, guitar both sedate and squealing and string atmospherics; these two tracks together would constitute a career high. But throughout the album are simpler concepts: the poised cod-Wagnerian attack of “Tristan", after which the titular hero might as well either drop his armor or drop dead; the lilting bass, sweep of strings and ghostly backing vocals of “Sing To Me", which could have arisen from the mists of a Goldfrapp pastoral; or the choral haze of “The Bridge” that seems to exist in a separate, more austere universe from anything Calvi or her peers have recorded.
Sadly, of all One Breath’s disparate ideas, not all are so iconoclastic. “Eliza” starts out as an MOR folk song, as if someone heard last album’s single “Desire” and thought it’d make a great Mumford stomper if it weren’t so damn arty. Eventually, a tense “Surgeon” guitar solo and operatic coda half-redeem the arrangement, but they’re too late and too short-lived. The sludgy “Bleed Into Me” slips from drama into melodrama without much fuss either way, and a brief guitar freakout is all that keeps “Cry” from slipping farther still, into the territory of Leona Lewis. Paradoxically, One Breath being such a musically omnivorous album only worsens matters—on an album with a more consistent sound, any of these tracks might be excused as natural lowlights to its highlights, but One Breath has such a surfeit of ideas that they just come off as the weaker ones that weren’t cut.
As problems go, though, this isn’t so bad. Calvi’s said the recording process for One Breath was quite fast for her, requiring her to rely on quick decisions more than revision, and perhaps that bears part of the blame. Calvi’s synthesized enough musical styles for at least three artists, and she’s clearly got ample chops to pull any of them off. She’s born to make a grand concept album one day. What she needs now is that grand concept.


On the follow-up to 2011’s Deep Politics, the Portland post-rock trio have subtly expanded their approach, building moods of somber reflection, energized optimism, and cathartic release.

Chalice Hymnal

If “rock” can be a verb, then so can “post-rock,” and Grails know how to post-rock. The Portland group began after the genre’s first wave, but they’re so well-versed in dramatic, soundtrack-ready instrumentalism that they could pass for originators in a blindfold test. Through seven albums over 15 years, they’ve made a convincing case for the potential and durability of post-rock, covering diverse terrain—metal, psych, krautrock, ambience, soft rock—while maintaining a consistent musical language.
In fact, Grails’ language is so strong that the six year gap between their last album, 2011’s Deep Politics, and their new effort Chalice Hymnal feels like a mere blip. The group—sometimes a sextet, for now a trio—continues their wordless conversation so smoothly that one song, “Deep Snow II,” actually picks up almost exactly where Deep Politics’ “Deep Snow” left off. In line with their career trajectory, this album differs from its predecessor only because Grails have subtly deepened their sonic scope, committing even more to each of the many styles they’ve explored in the past.
Yet there’s no gratuitous novelty in Chalice Hymnal’s 11 tracks. Expansion is a goal, but it’s never the main point. As compositionally complex and technically adept as their songs are, Grails are always most interested in building moods and evoking emotions: somber reflection, energized optimism, wistful nostalgia, and most often, cathartic release. At times they prioritize mood-building to a fault, like when the misty “Rebecca” veers toward easy listening. But if they’re going to err, better that they lean toward the overly sentimental than the wankily proficient.
There’s not many errors on Chalice Hymnal, though, since Grails are too experienced and familiar with their own strengths to let anything egregious slip past. Each track establishes a tone firmly and executes it confidently. Hence the chugging groove of “Pelham,” the sludgy riffery of “New Prague,” and the theatrical swells of “The Moth & the Flame” feel like tonal siblings even though they’re stylistically disparate. Some tracks even contrast themselves: “Tough Guy”’s majestic march gives way to clouds of ambience before returning to forward motion.
None of that variety would matter if Chalice Hymnal wasn’t so emotionally resonant. Grails understand that post-rock is largely about structure—the way sounds gather and escalate, the way each part reflects what came before and points toward what’s next—and their mastery comes from treating music as sonic architecture. On Chalice Hymnal, they’ve added another solid story to their growing skyscraper.