Spencer Krug's latest release as Moonface features the former Wolf Parade/Sunset Rubdown member again by his lonesome. Written and recorded in his temporarily adopted home of Helsinki, City Wrecker reflects a sense of frigid displacement.

City Wrecker EP

Spencer Krug’s songwriting is elastic. In the past, his sumptuous, warbling melodrama has been able to serve as the framework for larger arrangements, as in his prior outfits Wolf Parade and Swan Lake, as well as the minimalism sprinkled in his sometimes-solo projects Sunset Rubdown and Moonface. Like Sunset Rubdown, Moonface began as Krug alone and eventually expanded to an entire band. After Moonface’s 2012 LP With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery (which, as advertised, was made with the Finnish band Siinai), the project was scaled back for 2013’s lonesome, voice-and-piano album Julia With Blue Jeans On. Krug’s follow-up to Julia is the five-song EP City Wrecker, and it operates along the same compositional lines as its immediate predecessor. It was also, like Julia, written and recorded in his temporarily adopted home of Helsinki, and it reflects that same sense of frigid displacement. Krug has the ability to stretch himself, but here, he’s chosen not to, and it sounds like a certain stiffness has set in with regards to his songwriting.
Nonetheless, City Wrecker puts Krug through his paces. The most demanding of the EP’s five songs, “Daughter of a Dove”, is nearly 11 minutes long; the song right before it, “Helsinki Winter 2013”, clocks in at over eight. “Daughter” is the showpiece of the EP, a marathon of cascading runs on the keys broken up by clusters of chords that attack and decay in rapid cycles. Still, he plays with an audible slouch, as if entire galaxies of regret rest on his shoulders: “There is a fallen tree against a perfect January snow/ And that’s as spiritual as I need to be.” Just as it seems Krug is taking the Scandinavian pagan black-metal route, he adds, “So when they said turn up the kick drum, turn up the snare/ I turned away to see my baby put a flower in her hair.” “Daughter” is also City Wrecker’s most embroidered track; in addition to piano, the song’s slow crescendo is built on a flood of crystalline synths, like water swirling under the ice. “Helsinki Winter 2013” is more delicate and less bombastic, a demonstration of Krug’s classical prowess in which he sings, “You belong where you are found/ Overseas, underground.” Coming from a Finland-residing Canadian transplant, it’s a little on the nose, but no less arresting because of it.
“The Fog” doesn’t do much to help dispel the “cold album made in a cold place” cliché that City Wrecker evokes, but Krug, as always, is self-aware to the point of pain. The song trembles and reverberates, with synths that erupt and flutter like blossoms bursting out of a snowfall; it’s vague, without dramatic chord changes or much of a vocal dynamic, and as such cultivates too much of a sedative numbness. Unlike Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas, who has struck gold in the past with the same implements used on City Wrecker, Krug doesn’t insert enough tonal distance between his instrument and his voice, which is evident on “Running in Place With Everyone”. The tune resembles a finger exercise mashed up with monotone poetry; it’s pretty, but when Krug coos the song’s title in the chorus, his energy level sounds less kinetic than it does spent.
“The city fell into a sort of boring ruin,” Krug confesses on City Wrecker’s title track. He’s singing about Montreal, his longtime home, and the lassitude of guilt and longing practically leaks from his lungs. It’s an anthem for burned bridges and scorched earth, as well as the warmest, most flesh-and-blood moment of the EP. His melody is limited, but it makes the most of its cramped, claustrophobic clutch of notes. Where Julia filled almost every available space with either emotional fullness or palpable absence, City Wrecker feels pinched and constrained; the former was a drain to listen to in the best possible way, while this new one only occasionally breaks the skin.


The soundtrack from the new Marvel blockbuster has a staggering sonic diversity, but the absence of a curator is felt in how loosely songs are tied to the movie.

Various Artists: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Music From and Inspired By

The first Black Panther had many themes—neocolonialism, infighting and unity across the African diaspora, the abundance of Soundcloud rappers in the late 2010s—but its most potent was the story of T’Challa becoming his own leader and his own man. In the record-smashing Marvel blockbuster from 2018, T’Challa had just inherited the throne of Wakanda and spent most of the film figuratively and literally grappling with the consequences of his ancestor’s actions. In the end, T’Challa kills his insurrectionist cousin Killmonger before taking his advice and opening up Wakanda’s borders to the world—with an emphasis on Black people and displaced Wakandans around the world—for the first time. By embracing the role of the Black Panther on his own terms, T’Challa set a new chapter in motion for the most technologically advanced nation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s version of Earth.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever deals with an inversion of the same main challenge. T’Challa is dead—actor Chadwick Boseman passed away from a long and private battle with colon cancer in 2020—and without their warrior king, Wakanda is in disrepair. Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright), Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), spy Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), and general Okoye (Danai Gurira) attempt to pick up the pieces and fend off invading forces, including those from Talokan, an underwater society led by Namor (Tenoch Huerta). Everyone involved confronts the weight of inheritance amid the fallout from T’Challa’s death, giving Wakanda Forever a more somber tone compared to the celebratory burst of the original. The film’s soundtrack follows in lockstep, trading the fireworks and scope of the Kendrick Lamar and TDE-led Black Panther The Album from 2018 for something more intimate but no less devoted to intercultural exchange.
Also unlike Black Panther The Album, Wakanda Forever has no celebrity guest curator. Director Ryan Coogler and composer Ludwig Göransson tackled the entire project themselves, recording over 2,500 hours of music across three continents. Göransson spent time in both Mexico City and Lagos familiarizing himself with local instruments and sounds, and the expanded roster of voices brings dimension to the soundtrack’s best songs. To accommodate the new characters from the Mayan-influenced Talokan, Latino and Mesoamerican artists are sprinkled in with others from across the African diaspora; South African amapiano shares space with Bay Area hip-hop, Afrobeats, R&B, reggae, and Mexican folk music.
Wakanda Forever’s musical diversity is staggering, and its best songs both flesh out their respective cultures and key moments in the movie. Namor’s birth scene is amplified by Mexican singer Vivir Quintana and rapper Mare Advertencia Lirika’s haunting vocals over deep drums and shakers on “Árboles Bajo El Mar.” Pivotal scenes within Talokan and Wakanda are soundtracked by the aqueous synths of Foudeqush and Göransson’s gossamer “Con La Brisa” and the shuffling vibrance of Fireboy DML’s “Coming Back For You,” respectively. Aside from the bland ramblings of Tobe and Fat Nwigwe on the chase scene number “They Want It, But No,” most of the songs used in the movie proper work within and out of their filmic context, painting their respective pictures in your mind on every replay.
The rest of the songs across the “from” and “inspired by” sections of the album are more of a mixed bag. The two highest profile tracks—Rihanna’s Chadwick Boseman tribute “Lift Me Up” and Tems’ cover of the Bob Marley staple “No Woman, No Cry”—are competent ballads meant for endless rotation on the autumn playlist at your local mall. Snow tha Product and E-40 bring an infectious Bay Area energy to “La Vida” that doesn’t quite translate to Oakland rapper OG DAYV’s “Limoncello,” bookended by an autopiloted Future verse. It’s fun to skim through Ckay and PinkPantheress’ dainty duet on “Anya Mmiri” and to hear Mexican rapper Pat Boy rap entirely in Mayan on “Laayli’ kuxa’ano’one,” but there’s a lack of truly show-stopping moments. While part of that is clearly by design because of the more reflective tone, another part stems from the lack of a guiding voice.
The reason why Kendrick’s presence on Black Panther The Album—and Beyoncé’s presence on her 2019 Lion King companion album The Lion King: The Gift—is effective goes beyond being a co-sign from a Black musical powerhouse. Those two albums worked because their leading artists embodied their films’ respective themes and used them to tie every song together. Kendrick’s relationship with spirituality and identity matched T’Challa’s in the same way that Beyoncé’s explorations of family and honor spoke to Simba and Nala’s. Different artists from different genres and countries shared space, yet every song was in conversation with each other. Coogler and Göransson’s efforts are admirable, but there’s no analogue for that on Wakanda Forever, no uniting element to emphasize the importance of T’Challa’s—and Boseman’s—passing. Many of these songs nominally speak to themes of spirituality, inheritance, and connection, but their respective conversations begin and end when their time runs out. That lack of connective tissue means the messages feel anonymous, even hollow; it doesn’t make the songs any less good, but it makes the album feel disposable when it should be anything but.


Eugene Robinson returns with a record that's sparser than his band's more metallic styles, and, paradoxically, much heavier.

The Narcotic Story

A guy dies and goes to Hell. The devil tells him that he has three choices as to where he'll spend his eternal damnation. The devil opens a door, behind which people writhe in perpetual flames. "No way," says the guy. The devil opens another door, behind which people convulse on an electrified floor. "Uh-uh," says the guy. The devil opens a third door. Behind it, people are buried to their necks in excrement, each sipping a cup of tea with one free hand. "Well, beats the other two," says the guy. "I'll take it." He eases into the filth, and just as he takes his first sip of tea, a voice comes over Hell's intercom: "Okay everybody, tea break's over-- back on your heads!"
The joke, like most, masks multiple profundities-- that we all create our own Hells, that none of our vaunted free will or personal agency will keep us from our final reward, and that poo is funny. But while most of us choose one Hell, Oxbow's Eugene Robinson is in the unique position of residing simultaneously in all three. A slab of lurid and tattooed muscle, often near-nude, Robinson strikes a fearsome presence at Oxbow shows, seeming to writhe as if burned and shudder as if electrocuted at once. (This is a guy who out-scaried Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart on his own song, a harrowing cover of "Saturn".) And given his gibbering delivery and nihilistic lyrics, which always seem unhealthily scatological even when they don't deal specifically with shit, he would probably be quite comfy in the third room of Hell, especially were the tea replaced with something more potent: embalming fluid, perhaps, or bleach.
Oxbow have been a metal band, one steadily moving into more credibly frightening territory. At this point, one can scarcely identify them with traditional metal's canned, often hokey menace, as The Narcotic Story fully embraces a sort of slow-burning, infernal blues. It's a malign transmission, sparser than Oxbow's more metallic styles, and, paradoxically, much heavier. After establishing its extreme poles with a brief intro of piercing ambient tones and heavy-bowelled bleats, The Narcotic Story sustains a deft balance between creeping dirges and panicky rock for its duration. Its evocative disorder is remindful of U.S. Maple, and Robinson's blood-curdling polecat yowl recalls David Yow and the Frogs in equal measure.
"Geometry of Business" is a raw-boned, blowsy blues with fuzz bass bombs and creeping pianos-- the lyrics, as elsewhere on the album, are mostly, mercifully, unintelligible. Through repeated false starts, the noodly quiet of "Time Gentlemen Time" arduously erupts into a sturdy rock slog, shrill tones rising up from the wrecked chords and howled imprecations. By the time the crusty blues-metal swagger of "Down a Stair Backward" bleeds into the orchestral butt-jazz of "She's a Find", it's clear that Oxbow's usual laddering plod is doubled in effect by the more elegant, tension-building passages that they've stitched, Frankenstein's-monster-style, into it. Every piano-laced tea break is cut short by a sulfurous blare, and then it's back onto our heads, back into Robinson's world of shit.


At their best, as on Arrival, ABBA were as mysterious as Bowie, as rococo as Phil Spector, as unbearably sad as the Smiths.

Arrival

Sid Vicious loved ABBA. Joe Strummer loved ABBA. Pete Townshend really loved ABBA. As a five year-old boy on a Welsh council estate in 1977, I loved ABBA. My mum and dad loved ABBA. If ever I went round to a friend’s house whose parents had a record player in the living room, you could count on there being an ABBA LP leaning in the Formica cabinet beside it. Everyone, so it seemed in my five year-old’s perspective of the universe, loved ABBA.
The four Swedes—two couples, Agnetha and Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid (aka “Frida”)—first invaded British shores in 1974 at the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton with their winning entry, “Waterloo”; the United Kingdom awarded ABBA “nil points” on the night, making their subsequent domination of our charts one of the sweetest revenges outside the pages of The Count Of Monte Cristo. They properly conquered in 1976 with their Greatest Hits, the year’s biggest-selling album and the second biggest-selling album in Britain of the 1970s (beaten by Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water which had the advantage of a six-year head start). The same year saw a triptych of UK number ones: “Money, Money, Money,” “Fernando,” and the unstoppable “Dancing Queen,” which sold over a million copies and spent six solid weeks at the top. That the latter’s parent album, Arrival released in October 1976, should consolidate their stronghold was a fait accompli. By 1977 ABBA were unshiftable, omnipresent and commercially invincible.
Arrival was their fourth studio album but the first to forge an identity in tandem with its introduction of their soon-to-be iconic trademark reversed B logo. Its three predecessors—1973’s Ring Ring, 1974’s Waterloo, and 1975’s ABBA—had been a series of costume-changing forays and false-starts through folk-rock, glam, light ballads, and novelty rock‘n’roll. Nobody yet regarded ABBA as an albums band until the million-selling phenomenon of 1976’s Greatest Hits propelled them to the forefront of the market. An intriguingly-misnamed 15 track compilation from an act who’d so far made the UK singles charts just five times, to British audiences Greatest Hits acted as ABBA’s equivalent to a debut album, its success highlighting a major transformative shift: from the bedroom turntable at 45 rpm to the family stereo at 33 1/3. ABBA could never have succeeded as a teen pop act alone. The coup of Greatest Hits owed much to its appeal to the same age group as seen on its cover: four adults sat on a park bench in contrastingly coupled yin and yang of romantic bliss and collapse.
If Greatest Hits certified ABBA as undisputed superstars, on Arrival, the first album to follow it six months later, they finally looked like superstars, the kind who travelled in private helicopters like the one on the cover in which they’re cocooned with curiously cool expressions. The distance between this image and the terrestrial park bench portrait of Greatest Hits can be measured in light years. They could be The Tomorrow People. They could be from Tatooine. They could be four superbeings itching to escape some spooky spherical Phantom Zone. They are unmistakably other.
At their best, as on Arrival, ABBA are as mysteriously out-there as Bowie, as rococo as Phil Spector, as unbearably sad as the Smiths. At the centre of their infinitely bright star is a throbbing black mass of pain. “The Winner Takes It All” from 1980’s Super Trouper is still the debate-settler that ABBA are pop’s greatest tragedians, hailing as they do from a land of inherently fatalistic art, from the films of Ingmar Bergman to the face of Greta Garbo. The pagan Swedes of old believed that the end of the world was a coming inevitability they called “ragnarok.” ABBA are the sweet echo of that same ancient stoic pessimism. Ragnarok‘n’roll.
The second track on Arrival and ABBA’s only US number one in April 1977, “Dancing Queen” is one of the greatest pop records ever made because, like so many of the greatest pop records ever made, it throws multiple reflections. Its surface beauty and emotional depth is wholly dependent on the ear of its beholder. For some, it’s an emancipatory cry of joy. For others, a bawl from an abyss of sorrow. The song’s first discernible human sound is a suspended, exhaled “Ooo-ooh!” It could be a dove-like coo, or it could be a suppressed sob. Perhaps this is the song of someone who wants to be Esmeralda but knows they are Quasimodo; the harrowing dream of life outside as imagined by somebody imprisoned indoors. The “dancing queen” could be an isolated young girl alone in her bedroom, too scared, too shy, almost certainly believing herself too hideous to step out into Friday night; her one happiness her unrealistic fantasy that she could find love amongst the beautiful people out on the dancefloor.  In this, its darkest reflection, the one directed by Bergman and starring Garbo, “Dancing Queen” is a song about the loneliest girl in the world, a “How Soon Is Now?” in “Rock Your Baby”’s clothing.
It’s safe to say that the ABBA writing team of Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, and manager Stig Anderson were not trying to create a “How Soon Is Now?”; the abandoned first verse of its original 1975 demo began with the bubble-gum burst of “Baby, baby, you’re outta sight!” But they were trying to write a “Rock Your Baby.” The rhythm of “Dancing Queen” was directly inspired by George McCrae’s 1974 hit, even if theirs hasn’t quite the same slickness of syncopation. There’s a strange falter, as if the beat is stumbling under the weight of the flamboyant Liberace piano pounding overhead. “Dancing Queen” is almost disco, were it not for that rhythmic limp. It’s clubfooted disco, American R&B as could only be made by white Vikings who didn’t fully understand the instructions.
The power of their music lies in the enigmatic Mona Lisa smile created by similar accidents of mistranslation. As Andersson once stressed, “We are not Anglo-Saxon.” ABBA were four spectacularly talented Nordic persons trying to emulate Western Anglo-Saxon pop. Their ancestral blood was non-Christian, an ice-and-fire race who believed in giants, dwarves and elves, of ancient pagan sagas that inspired Wagner and Tolkien. The members of ABBA could learn and sing in English, but they still thought like Scandinavians. Their phrasings made grammatical sense but their assembly of words were not the natural choices of any lyricist for whom English was a first language.
It may also explain why the biggest-selling album in Britain of 1977 opens with a song about a schoolgirl aching to sleep with her geometry teacher. There is no ambiguity of meaning in the harmonic rush of “When I Kissed The Teacher.” “One of these days,” sings Agnetha, “gonna teach him a lesson alright.” The moral dilemma of this unexpurgated Lolita pop is only numbed by its sheer innocence of delivery. But then “love” in ABBA songs, legal or otherwise, rarely runs smooth. “My Love, My Life” and “Knowing Me, Knowing You” are two adjoining sides of the same heartbroken prism, the words of both virtually interchangeable. “I know I don’t possess you/So go away, God bless you” wails the first. “Breaking up is never easy I know/But I have to go,” sighs the second. In ABBA songs people are always going, never to but forever away.
None of the lyrical protagonists on Arrival are happy. “Carrie,” the heroine of the neurotic disco-ragtime “That’s Me,” is a self-deprecating mess. The woman in the daft “Dum Dum Diddle” is ill with sexual frustration, literal second fiddle to her maestro lover who’d sooner pluck his Stradivarius. The narrator of the Cabaret-inspired “Money, Money, Money” yearns for a rich Trump-style suitor, but “if he happens to be free, I bet he wouldn’t fancy me.” Men, too, get just as raw a deal on “Why Did It Have To Be Me?,” Björn’s barroom boogie about a sap who loses his heart, all but one lap-steel and two fingers of whisky short of vintage Hank Williams.
And then along comes Jack the Ripper. “I am behind you, I’ll always find you,” screech the banshee sisterhood of Agnetha and Frida on the predatory “Tiger,” a fabulously unsettling psycho-pop thriller of urban dystopia and Droogish violence not so very far away from Diamond Dogs: “The city is a nightmare, a horrible dream.” “Tiger” is an alarmist horror story of metropolitan evil as imagined by folk who did most of their songwriting in an idyllic country cottage on Stockholm’s island peninsula. It’s also one of the better demonstrations of the sonic voodoo that occurs in the vacuum between Agnetha’s and Frida’s voices, a skull-rattling counterpoint when their respective wavelengths collide to create a near-supernatural vibration.
This same nuclear fusion of blonde soprano and auburn mezzo-soprano is why all attempts to cover ABBA songs end in failure. They are literally inimitable. ABBA’s music lands on the ear in bold strokes, but it arrives there through the most meticulous construction. They are not European impressionists but Northern renaissance masters, building up the sound layer by layer, one coat at a time with fanatical precision. Hence the glow in the opening notes of “My Love, My Life,” an ethereal cosmic tone evoking the fellow Scandinavian-blooded Gustav Holst. Hence the Valkyrie choir of “Dancing Queen” detonating its apocalypse of goosebumps. And hence why Arrival’s closing title track feels like being serenaded to sleep by God.
“Arrival,” the song, is colossal. Less a song, since there are no words, than a glacier of sound, the eerie buzz of divine light as it harpoons through stormy clouds. “Arrival” was named after the title of the album had already been decided. As originally written it was called “Ode to Dalecarlia” in honour of the Swedish folk province where, as late as the 19th century, the local culture still communicated in medieval runes straight out of The Hobbit. Melodically, “Arrival” is therefore ABBA at their most inscrutably Nordic and, to Anglo-Saxon ears, at their most other. It is a hymn from beyond the stars.
Last month it was announced that ABBA are due to make a live “comeback” of sorts in 2018, though seemingly not in physical body but some form of virtual spirit. Described as “a time machine,” the project in partnership with American Idol mogul Simon Fuller will “enable a new generation of fans to see, hear, and feel ABBA in a way previously unimagined.” Touring holograms, perhaps? If so, it would be a fitting fate for the intangible enigma of ABBA. At once here and not here, teasing us in the void between. Forty years later, still waiting for them to arrive.


Former Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb finally steps to the microphone on his first album in 16 years, a meticulously arranged wonder steeped in English folk and proggy vibes.

Drift Code

Remember when Bono generously allowed The Edge to sing that one song on Rattle and Hum? A flicker of shock tends to register when you hear a member of a beloved band who is not the vocalist sing for the first time. It’s like hearing an internet personality interviewed on a podcast— “Wait, they sound like that?” During his seven years in Talk Talk, a period in which the group mutated from the routine synthpop of The Party’s Over to the astonishing art-rock of Spirit of Eden, bassist Paul Webb never sang lead. Mark Hollis, owner of one of the great expressive voices of the 1980s, had that job covered. Even when Webb resurfaced during the early 2000s as Rustin Man, he shied from the spotlight, releasing the quiet gem Out of Season in collaboration with another mood-altering vocal talent, Beth Gibbons.
But at last, Webb’s own voice is the centerpiece of an album—Rustin Man’s rich and rewarding Drift Code, his first record in 16 years. Yes, Webb sang a bit in the short-lived .O.rang, but here he is writing specifically for his surprisingly commanding, unmistakably English warble. At times, he even sounds like late-career Bowie, adventurous and a bit haughty thanks to a distinguished nasality. This is particularly true of opener “Vanishing Heart,” which rises in both urgency and volume as Webb narrates an escape from a suffocating marriage over labyrinthine piano. He deftly sings harmony and counter-harmony with himself, too, as in the clamorous final refrains of “Martian Garden.” (Though Hollis grew to avoid anything resembling a chorus, Webb doesn’t shy away from legitimate vocal hooks.) And he sometimes stretches words beyond recognition, as when he renders the title phrase of finale “All Summer” as a six- and seven-syllable maze.
These nine songs collectively recall English folk, 1970s prog grandeur, and the work of great British eccentrics like Robert Wyatt and Syd Barrett. Organs, upright piano, and even a euphonium contribute to this vintage sensibility. Webb momentarily stumbles on “Judgement Train,” a clunky blues shuffle in which the singer envisions himself facing off against God in what O.A.R. would call a crazy game of poker. (The track’s sinister video, in fact, makes good on this concept.) But the gorgeous subsequent track, “Brings Me Joy,” makes up for it, with Webb’s lead set against a choral web of voices, including an angelic falsetto that feels plucked from an old Disney score. “Light the Light” is a pointy exercise in 7/8 time, while “The World’s in Town” boasts a sci-fi guitar breakdown before its spacious outro.
Drift Code doesn’t sound like Talk Talk (nor anything that could be described as “post-rock”), but what it shares with the band’s best work is both the sense of being adrift in time and a meticulous approach to production. These arrangements flicker with intricate melodic detail and nonconventional instrumentation. “Our Tomorrows,” for instance, concludes with a rousing trombone chorus, while “Light the Light” embellishes its staccato piano with wah-wah guitar and a fleeting xylophone coda. It might take some time to hear that last detail, as with the hammered sitar, flugelhorn, French horn, clavioline, and pandeiro that pepper the record. Webb seems to have taken Talk Talk’s interest in unusual instrumentation with him.
Talk Talk’s legacy is so coated in silence and mystique that Drift Code’s mere existence feels like a perplexing gift. When a member of this band emerges from the ether, you pay attention; there will be, after all, no reunion tour. And, in this case, you mutter, “That’s what his voice sounds like?” with welcome surprise.


Australian sound artist and Room40 founder Lawrence English is responsible for the existence of a daunting number of recordings, especially in regards to his own solo career. His latest solo album and first in three years gins up infernos of harmonic distortion not unlike the heavier sides of Tim Hecker and Ben Frost.

Wilderness of Mirrors

Australian sound artist Lawrence English is responsible for the existence of a daunting number of recordings. As the founder of the Room40 label, he curates contemporary ambient and experimental music by the likes of Mike Cooper, Ben Frost, Grouper, Tim Hecker, Greg Davis, Oren Ambarchi, and David Toop, and English makes the same kind of music he releases—in abundance. The selected discography on his website runs to more than 30 items. Diving in at random, you could luck into the glittering electro-acoustic miniatures of A Path Less Travelled, his collaboration with Japanese group Minamo, or the brightly mottled drone of A Colour for Autumn, one of English's most fully realized works by the traditional album standards of variety and cohesion.
But you could just as easily land in more of a niche taste, such as the fine but ascetic For/Not for John Cage or the crumbling edifice of organ chords on Lonely Women's Club. Save yourself some floundering, then, by starting with English's newest album, Wilderness of Mirrors. His first proper solo album since 2011's chorally inclined The Peregrine, it gins up infernos of harmonic distortion not unlike the heavier sides of Hecker and Frost. With a couple of minimalist exceptions—the winding gusts of "Guillotines and Kingmakers" hearken back to Cage, while low frequencies roil between ghost harmonies on "Wrapped in Skin"—this is a maximalist effort, smear-painted on an abyssal dynamic range in scintillating masses of slow-moving tone.
English has said that the album is named after a line from T.S. Eliot's poem "Gerontion" and is conceptually based on Cold War misinformation campaigns—which, sure, why not? If abstract music has to be about something, that'll do. More meaningfully, English saw killer shows by Swans, Earth, and My Bloody Valentine while recording the album and was inspired to pump up the volume and density of his music, which is felt right away on "The Liquid Casket", a giant exhalation of thickly flexing drones that soon ignites in a radioactive mushroom cloud. English is an experienced technician, and his saturation of stereo space and tonality never grows murky—the songs make distinct impressions, from the backwards suck of the title track, like a foghorn tolling over heavy traffic, to the slowly subsiding muffled concussions of "Another Body" and the ritualistic cadence of "Hapless Gatherer".
Consistently, English cannily weighs out sticky, swarming passages against smooth pearlescent lengths, often drawing one out of the other with magisterial patience. The compositions range from delicate to mighty, and always activate invigorating corporeal effects. Wilderness of Mirrors isn't groundbreaking in general, but it is new territory for the often-cerebral English, and he puts an engaging, commanding stamp on this style of ambient overdrive hymn.


Berlin studio mastermind and ~scape label proprietor Stefan Betke's latest in gurgling, crackling dub reductionism brims with ideas and vitality.

Steingarten

Good news: Pole's new album doesn't really sound anything like his last, 2003's self-titled effort for Mute. Even better news: It sounds even less like his early work. In one fell swoop, Pole-- Berlin studio mastermind and ~scape label proprietor Stefan Betke-- has slipped the yoke of early classics and mid-career questing alike, resulting in an album that brims with ideas and vitality but is utterly unique.
A quick recap. Pole-- Betke's fourth album, and his sole longplayer for Mute, after a long run with Germany's Kiff, which licensed his material to Matador in the U.S.-- marked a concerted effort by Stefan Betke to escape the omnipresent signature of 1, 2, and 3, the classic trilogy in which he proposed and perfected an idea of gurgling, crackling dub reductionism built of little more than sigh and suggestion. Flirting with hip-hop and a newly aerated sound, Pole succeeding in escaping what Mark Richardson, writing in Pitchfork, described as the "cul de sac" of the artist's calcifying style, but only at the expense of the kind of coherence and cohesion that had marked his efforts until that point. He had to try something, of course. The first three records were brilliant, dredging the sedimented floor of third-hand ideas of dub passed from sources like Seefeel's "isolationist" ambient music and Chain Reaction's shimmering "heroin house"-- and running the sludge through a rickety pipeline of busted filters and loose wires. But no matter how much mica (and who knows, gold) flecked his gloriously gunky stuff, there were only so many ways he could take it: even the most astonishing builders of sand castles are, ultimately, constrained by their materials.
Steingarten is still based upon dub reggae, from its loping rhythms to its revolving-door chord changes to traditional reggae staples like melodica and waxy analog delay. There's still plenty of fizz in the margins, too, though it no longer defines the shape of the songs. You can kinda sorta hear a glimmer of hip-hop in the opening cut, though thankfully there's no vocalist this time out, and two of the tracks here-- the back-to-back "Düsseldorf" and "Jungs"-- absorb the ubiquitous tick-tocking of Berlin minimal techno. But despite a continuity of influence, the sound of Pole's production-- its very heft-- is completely and refreshingly new.
This time out, Pole has reconfigured his relationship with gravity. Where before the music felt held together (and sometimes held down) by the weight of history-- both the music's and the musician's-- and the massing sound itself, here the individual parts hang together easily, as if brought together by chance and left bobbing in each other's orbits. The music is full of empty space, though it's not the insistent absence of minimalism-- more like the languid silence between two lovers who know when speech is moot. You can hear it in the opening track, "Warum", where every instrument-- from the aerosol shaker to the handclaps that crack like coals burning low-- stakes out its space in the mix, ceding the middle ground to... well, to nothing at all, really. There's just a wide swathe of ground, inviting you to stand there, stretch out and touch the sounds around you. It's certainly one of the most welcoming approaches to mixing and mastering I've heard.
The other big update this time out is the addition of noise-- not the blasted scree of Merzbow but an agreeable skronk sourced from muted guitar feedback and weeping tremolo. From the tube-amp uprising caught on "Winkelstreben" to the way he hammers at the guitar strings pulled taut below the bridge, it sounds like Betke was listening to Sonic Youth's Evol while recording Steingarten. It would be appropriate if it were true, given that this album represents the most important evolution in Pole's career.
More than anything, Steingarten is a remarkably easy-going album. Like all great recordings, it opens up over time, yielding fresh discoveries with repeat listens, but it hardly guards its secrets. You can hear the simplest kind of joy in the way (in "Düsseldorf") a high-pitched, pinging note run through delay begins gradually to throb out of time with the rhythm track. The opposing shapes and textures in "Winkelstreben" create totally unexpected convergences-- improbable harmonies on a par with those found in the best abstract painting or Japanese fashion. Full of resonant, glistening, almost tangible sounds, Steingarten is a synaesthetic's dream; I find myself continually running up against the limits of my own descriptive powers in trying to tackle its pear-shaped bass drops, its corrugated ambient underpinnings, its frog-throated choruses.
By contemporary standards, this is a short album: nine songs, 45 minutes. It takes guts to hold oneself to such meager numbers after a four-year hiatus, but Betke got it absolutely right: there's not a note out of place on this thing, not a single thread of delay that overstays its welcome. Steingarten is a nearly perfect album. Putting the melancholic "Pferd" last is just another of the record's successes; it makes the whole thing feel like a kind of meditation on the very nature of limits and limitations. Given the history of his Pole project, that's likely something Betke has mulled over plenty. Here, with inscrutable agility-- like the mechanics of meditating upon a Zen koan-- he moots the whole issue and achieves something very much like a state of grace.


A ginormous, mostly fans-only box set gathers together 80 records that tell the singular story of a man who has dedicated his entire life to the three-minute pop song.

The 7" Singles

When the crate arrived at my house containing every solo Paul McCartney single on vinyl, I admit at first I gaped in horror: 80 7-inches, 159 tracks, sealed in a pine box. Who is this for? Me, that’s who: a 41-year-old white guy whose version of the White Album, taped off of his father’s vinyl, hiccuped so badly he sang along to a skipping “I Will” for 25 years. The Beatles-industrial complex is a fearsome thing, and to be reckoning with projects this big, still falling out of the sky, is both exhausting—when will it ever end?—and slightly wondrous. This melting border, where bald IP-grab cynicism meets childhood wonder, has been expanding for my entire adult life. If there is a labored metaphor to be reached between the Beatles and Star Wars, that other endlessly renewing fount of nostalgia (hold tight), The 7" Singles Box is somewhere between Obi-Wan Kenobi (pointless, hollow) and Andor (unnecessary, but delightful).
Besides collecting every official McCartney single, The 7" Singles Box also scoops 15 miscellaneous tracks that leaked out into the world in other formats: CD singles, digital downloads, bonus tracks. The idea, as outlined in Rob Sheffield’s loving liner notes, is to present the 7" as McCartney’s Rosebud, containing in its fragile sleeve the ideal of the rock’n’roll song as a disposable piece of eternity.
The entire box is available on Spotify, of course, which is endlessly accommodating, but interacting with McCartney’s singles via little pieces of plastic feels right. They reflect his lifelong reverence for the three-minute rock ditty, but also embody the inherent flimsiness of the form. Making my way through 159 McCartney singles tested my immunity to his airy charm at regular intervals: My smile hardened into a grimace about every 20 minutes. There are only so many times in a row you can listen to someone capable of grandeur settle without compunction for something pleasingly slapdash before rolling your eyes and giving up. The “oh come on” factor rears its head continually, but it is countered at every turn by a raised-eyebrow “what is this?”
These two poles— “oh come on” and “ooh, what is this?”—comprise the agony and the ecstasy of the lifelong Paul project. He will never stop grabbing our ear: No one else in pop history boasts his gifts for both melody and arrangement, nor have they matched his enthusiasm for deploying them. For good or ill, no Paul McCartney song has ever taken your attention for granted. But having your ear grabbed 159 consecutive times in this set, only to be offered pablum like “love is fine, for all we know” (“Listen to What the Man Said”) roughly as often as you are rewarded—it will make you steel yourself against this wily charmer’s arts.
The box set kicks off with McCartney’s first post-Beatles single, the lovelorn and still-resonant “Another Day,” which could have easily fit on Let It Be. Understated, elegiac, and uncharacteristically muted, it was McCartney playing his best role: empathetic observer of others. The flip side, “Oh Woman, Oh Why” showcased a hammy Howlin’ Wolf impersonation so unrestrained and cartoony that he resembled a furry green Muppet more than any Delta bluesman.
And thus begins the story of McCartney’s solo career, a tale of cheery productivity and even cheerier disregard for results. Wherever there is inspiration there must be inanity, and with each gold nugget unearthed comes at least one nose-wrinkling dirt lump, a reality that comes into focus when each song is granted its own piece of vinyl and bespoke cover art. There is a particularly instructive humiliation in selecting a side of vinyl that contains only “We All Stand Together (The Frog Song)” and flipping it over only to be confronted by “We All Stand Together (Humming Version).”
After “Another Day,” we find ourselves abruptly in the Wings years, a discography that has proved itself remarkably immune to large-scale critical rediscovery or revival. These were the happy-hippie years, when Linda McCartney twirled onstage, bedecking the microphone with scarves and playing keyboard, harmonizing with Paul in her yowling, indelible way. Linda, frequently the target of derision from her husband’s fans, openly derided the group: “We just picked the wrong people,” she told Playboy in 1984. And here is Paul, remembering his time in Wings in Sheffield’s liner-notes essay: “It was the weirdest thing...There was me, having been one of the world’s most famous people, a member of the Beatles, playing in this semi-professional band kind of thing.”
If Paul had dubbed Wings “Paul McCartney and the Semi-Professional Band Kind of Thing,” they might have gotten a fairer shot: People would have understood just how badly Paul needed to be surrounded by people, any people, playing music and making records. If it wasn’t going to the Beatles, well...here were these guys. Paul and Linda were the heart of Wings, if there was such a thing, and the lovely moments in their discography arise directly out of their dizzy, daft chemistry. There were a lot of bongos in these songs, as well as the near-constant implication of bare feet. “You are my song, I am your singer,” they sang to each other, trading the lines and turning them into two halves of one mantra.
Surfing through McCartney’s Wings discography single by single turns up all manner of sidelong pleasures and revelations. The 1950s tribute “Love is Strange” works up a diffident ska-skiffle groove and then throws in a wayward guitar solo that provoked me into imagining a Built to Spill cover. The repetitive chant of “Let ’Em In” was dismissed by rock critics as doggerel, but Philly Soul legend Billy Paul heard a radical call to inclusion in McCartney’s language—“Someone’s knockin at the door...do me a favor, open the door and let ’em in,”—and recorded a cover that spliced in snippets of speeches from Malcolm X.
There is a slightly melancholy tinge to imagining the alternate futures some of these sunny McCartney songs could have had, in another set of circumstances or another timeline. “You Gave Me the Answer,” from Wings’ album Venus and Mars, was another in a long line of McCartney’s tributes to Great British Music Hall, the kind of chipper pre-rock’n’roll tunes he would debut to the groans of his fellow Beatles. But seen through the bird’s-eye view of the Macca box, it’s easy to imagine this song, with its winning couplet, “I love you, and you/You seem to like me,” taking the place of the godforsaken “Honey Pie” on the White Album, improving that album’s final side enormously.
The set also offers salutary reminders everywhere of Paul’s unselfconscious weirdness. Did you know that the teddy-bear Beatle managed to get himself banned from the BBC in 1972 for the chorus of “Hi, Hi, Hi,” (as in, “we’re gonna get”)? Have you heard him sing, on that same song, “I want you to lie on the bed, get you ready for my polygon,” followed by a discomfiting buzzing sound—a chainsaw? Buzzing bees? Have you heard his cover of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”? As if to prove some obscure McCartney hypothesis about just how slight of a scrap he could redeem with his talent and imagination, it undergoes several key changes and winds up sounding like an Abbey Road interlude.
At the twilight of the ’70s, the final Wings album, Back to the Egg, harbored the usual one or two moments of supreme grace and beauty: “Arrow Through Me,” a funky melange of Fender Rhodes and synthesized horn, basically adds a classic Hall & Oates song to the world under McCartney’s name. The tar-thick groove was deep enough to get Erykah Badu’s head bobbing, who sampled it for her 2010 classic “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long.”
As the ’80s dawned, Paul broke up Wings, expressing a desire to start “tinkering by myself like a mad professor locked up in his laboratory.” That impulse resulted in the unusually divisive (even for Paul) McCartney II, an album-length dive into synth presets and funny-sounding treated vocals that has been reclassified as a proper cult classic. The singles—“Temporary Secretary” b/w “Secret Friends”—are by now objects of fan devotion, often offered as evidence for the defense of his experimental impulses. But the sketches on McCartney II feel either graced or afflicted—depending on your perspective—by the same weightlessness that distinguishes “Silly Love Songs.” Listening to Paul’s solo work, you’re often forced to conclude that while writing songs matters to him more than anything in the world, this song, in particular, might be of very little importance. Finessing details, omitting flubbed lyrics, or revising bad ideas are all sacrificed to the ongoing flow, which is all that matters.
The set turns particularly unforgiving during the next two decades, a time during which McCartney’s best work reliably appeared on album tracks, hunched alongside garish singles. Sticking to singles throughout the ’80s means that instead of “Here Today,” his subdued tribute to John that still appears in his concerts, we get “Ebony and Ivory,” a No. 1 Stevie Wonder duet so repellent it practically birthed the Spectacularly Ill-Conceived Pop Star Appeal to Racial Unity subgenre (future examples: Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is the Love?”, Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist”). It means that instead of the lilting Everly Brothers throwback “Sweetest Little Show,” we get “The Girl Is Mine,” the only skip on Thriller. These were the years of teeth-setting frills like “We All Stand Together (The Frog Song),” “Spies Like Us,” and “My Carnival.” Things were so dire for Paul that in a 1985 cover story for Rolling Stone, Phil Collins felt smug enough to publicly offer him some help.
This trend of bad singles overshadowing good album tracks continued into the ’90s, albeit in more muted fashion. “Muted” is a good byword for ’90s solo Paul: while the Anthology series activated an entire new generation of Beatles obsessives, he played his role as Fab Four ambassador but otherwise laid low, perhaps chastened by the excesses of the previous decade. “Put It There” b/w “Mama’s Little Girl,” his first singles of the ’90s, were a direct callback to the grass-scented breezes of Ram and McCartney, consisting of nothing but his sweet voice and his acoustic guitar. The singles from his comeback album Flaming Pie were either mealy and undercooked rockers—“The World Tonight,” “Young Boy”—or mawkish ballads like “Beautiful Night,” all of them missing the spark of enthusiasm you could still hear in even his most syrupy ’80s material. With just this set as evidence, you’d never know of the existence of either “Little Willow” or “Calico Skies,” two lovely album tracks from Flaming Pie that are among the most affecting solo songs he wrote all decade.
As McCartney entered his sixth decade, something remarkable happened to his music. Age and loss, perhaps, had weathered him—cruelly, he lost Linda to cancer in 1998, when she was only 56—and there was a new autumnal croak in his voice, out of character for the eternal boy. He settled into his new role as an elder statesman and an album-oriented artist. Ironically, the moment he stopped straining to prove himself with hit singles, some of his best songs in decades popped out. In the albums he released in the ’00s—the riotous early rock’n’roll tribute album Run Devil Run, the Nigel Godrich-produced Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, the tough and mournful Driving Rain, and onward—the most emotionally opaque Beatle seemed to decide that maybe there wasn’t much point in playing his emotions so close to the vest. “Jenny Wren,” “From a Lover to a Friend,” “Fine Line” and other singles from these years nurse a quiet loneliness that feels entirely different from the blank merriment that characterizes so much of his earlier solo work. Even his life-affirming songs, like 2008’s “Sing the Changes,” had a newly desperate quality.
Paul McCartney is now 80. He just released a collection of his studio experiments last year, and based on the usual schedule of his output, he will probably record another full new record of rock songs in the next year or so. Then, health permitting, he will likely embark on a stadium tour. No one else has ever done this—devoted their lives to writing and recording hundreds of three-minute rock songs—for as long as he has, at such a high level, without getting bored. He has never decided to be above them, nor stopped throwing himself into the task of writing engaging, catchy ones.
In 1962, the same year John and Paul wrote “Love Me Do,” the art critic and painter Manny Farber published an essay entitled “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.” White elephant art, he wrote, was “masterpiece art,” concerned with posterity and timelessness, while termite art went about its omnivorous way, chewing energetically through borders and leaving nothing but pulp as evidence of its activity. When the Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney was unquestionably a white elephant artist, and he has spent the following four decades fighting his way to termite status.
How do you go from white elephant to termite? If you’re Paul, you just record. If your ideas don’t seem to match up with your best ones, put them out anyway, and hope the next batch yields more inspiration. Few songwriters in history have been less precious or more generous with their gifts. He’s continued writing songs and tossing them out into the wood chipper of expectations, then shrugging with a beatific grin when they are ignored or insulted. Inevitably, within a few years, he’s at it again. There is something perversely heroic about this toil, its utter disregard for anyone else’s notions about the sort of music he should be making. McCartney’s solo career is perhaps the longest sustained war any artist has carried out against their own narrative.
One of the last songs in the box set, “Queenie Eye,” is about as compelling as anything else here, and he released it when he was 71. And one of the most blood-freezing entries—the maybe-I’m-appalled lust anthem “Fuh You”—is even more recent. McCartney’s solo quality-control meter bedevils all at sweeping statements: McCartney is best when he keeps it simple, or when he’s ambitious, or when he plugs in and rocks, and so on. Because the truth is he has written great and awful songs in all these modes. You can never point reliably to the moment when he is “trying” versus when he is not: The only certainty with regard to McCartney’s songs is that there will soon be another.


Featuring Caroline Polachek, Kero Kero Bonito, and more, the latest from the PC Music artist is giddy and psychedelic, with a mischievous sense of humor.

Spalarkle

Of all the maximalist pop futurism that’s flowed out of the PC Music camp over the past decade, felicita’s take on the kinetic form stands apart. Melding woozy lullabies with jerking beats and pummeling rave explosions, the London-based artist’s 2018 debut album, hej!, transformed the rubbery pop stylings of their peers into an experimental collage. Over the years, they occasionally veered toward an even more enigmatic approach (see: Pillowese, a dream language inspired by glossolalia they conceived alongside the artist Lydia Ourahmane). On giddy new album Spalarkle, felicita returns to pop-rave mode without sacrificing their taste for abstraction, hopscotching between harsh and soft electronic music to sink into an off-kilter vision of psychedelia. It’s a head-spinning trip of joyfully hyperactive energy and digitized ballads.
Spalarkle thrives when felicita manages the chaos with needlepoint control. The title track, featuring frequent collaborator Caroline Polachek, shreds her operatic voice into ribbons during its shrieking, Alice in Wonderland-riffing chorus: “Alice! Vanish!” Here, felicita plays the Cheshire Cat, pulling out the rug with suddenly accelerating tempos and joyous, pulverizing synth melodies. Keeping with that song’s fairytale inspiration, felicita sews fantastical imagery into many lyrics, which makes room for a mischievous sense of humor. Samples of clucking chickens punctuate the cheerleader stomp on early highlight “Cluck,” in which Kero Kero Bonito’s Sarah Midori Perry sings about “tremendously buff” poultry juiced up on steroids. Later, peals of laughter interrupt the downbeat “ForeS Hopi,” breaking up its undulating flow with a dose of brightness. These unexpected additions add levity along the dizzying journey.
That lightheartedness tempers some of Spalarkle’s more drifting moments, often led by London vocalist Emma Warner. Her chanted vocals form a tranquil palette during “Can You See the Light Over There?,” which felicita interrupts with chittering handclaps and smacking beats. The sense of disrupted quiet continues through “Resistance,” a minimalist ballad in which Warner’s vocals are pitched into the realm of a plaintive digital voice assistant. “Underneath the crying screen, I’ll remember everything,” she sings over crashing waves. Though it’s a left turn, the interlude expresses a mournfulness lurking beneath the otherwise candy-coated exterior.
Felicita tries to balance those two poles throughout Spalarkle. They unspool an effervescent melody and quavering water droplets on the hypnagogic “Afraid” before pivoting to “Beast,” a jagged, menacing hip-hop track featuring frenetic Hong Kong rapper YoungQueenz. The whiplash isn’t as effective during the weaker tracks, like the cartoonish “Riff Raff,” whose bratty vocals and chainsawing guitars feel like self-parody. Yet the interfolded approach allows for pockets of transfixing beauty to emerge even in felicita’s busiest songs. Like the joyously outré “Cluck” or the slow-build trance workout “Sex With Anemone,” whose baffling title is repeated in a hushed whisper until it collapses into a wavy, mesmerizing blur, the best songs on Spalarkle showcase felicita’s sheer delight in toying with opposites to create richly expressionistic electronic music.


Co-produced by Rick Rubin, Neil Young’s 42nd album is a mellow, off-kilter collection about the environment, mourning what’s already been lost while expressing a modicum of hope.

World Record

Downtime is a foreign concept to Neil Young. He’s been in constant motion ever since Buffalo Springfield broke up way back in 1968, dividing his time between the studio and the stage, making more music than could be released in a given calendar year. World Record, his 42nd studio album, arrives less than a year after Barn, the album he knocked out at a studio in his newly adopted home in the Rocky Mountains—a place so dear to his heart, he named his 2019 reunion with his longtime running partners Crazy Horse after the state of Colorado.
Colorado appeared just prior to the arrival of COVID-19, the pandemic being the one thing to force Young off the road. He channeled his energy into combing through his vast archive—World Record is the seventh Neil record to appear in 2022, with a 50th-anniversary edition of his 1972 landmark Harvest following hot on its heels—grounding himself by taking breaks to commune with nature. As he walked with his dog, he discovered himself whistling melodies he couldn't quite place. He'd capture those nascent tunes on an old flip phone, pairing the music with words written at a later date. As he wrote the lyrics, a common theme arose: Every song was about the environment.
The resulting World Record bears a title as plainly self-explanatory as Barn: That album was made in a barn; this is a record about the planet. It’s familiar territory for Young. Long an environmental advocate—his early standard “After the Gold Rush” imagined surviving a world turned against itself—the state of the planet has been at the forefront of his mind during the past decade, driving the 2015 anti-corporate farming protest The Monsanto Years and its accompanying bizarro live album EARTH, both recorded with Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real. Unlike those records, Young isn’t in a political mood here. He spends his time on World Record ruminating over the effects of climate change, mourning what’s already been lost while expressing a modicum of hope, one that’s founded in the notion that love—love of the earth and of each other—is paramount.
Fittingly, Young recorded these songs with the band he loves best, the shambling, shaggy outfit Crazy Horse, which has featured guitarist Nils Lofgren since Frank “Poncho” Sampedro retired in 2014. Seeking to preserve the spontaneity at the heart of the Horse, Young brought the group to Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La Studios in Malibu—the same place he cut the politically charged Peace Trail in 2016—this time retaining the services of Rubin as a co-producer. The plan was simple: to record the 10 songs “live in order,” thereby capturing the group as they slowly gain momentum. Another wrench in the works was Young’s decision to play guitar on only three songs, otherwise devoting himself to either piano or pump organ. The instrumentation gives the album an amiable, off-kilter gait; it often seems like the band is on the verge of stumbling over its own feet, righted either by hammered keyboards from Young, a wallop from drummer Ralph Molina, or by a net woven by the guitars of Lofgren and Billy Talbot.
At first, World Record seems to coast by on its mood; there’s a bittersweet undercurrent flowing through the album but the weathered humanity of Crazy Horse always pulls the music away from melancholy. Often, the band feels like they’re deliberately avoiding their old tricks, finding new ways to arrive at the same destination. Generally, the proceedings have a light touch, a gentleness that is readily apparent on the opening shuffle “Love Earth” but also on the thicker rock’n’roll of “The World (Is in Trouble Now),” a warning call that vaguely echoes Herbie Hancock’s jazz classic “Watermelon Man” on its refrain. The mellow glow suits a band who is keenly aware of their long history and their advanced years—in an interview with The New Yorker to promote World Record, Young says retirement “doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility”—and the relaxed sound is a distinct variation within their body of work: Young and Crazy Horse rarely sound as at ease as they do here.
All of this genial warmth makes the closing “Chevrolet” hit harder. One of the band’s patented extended guitar workouts, “Chevrolet” feels like a collective exhale from Crazy Horse: They’ve spent the rest of the record on good behavior, now they finally get to push amps to a breaking point while Young rhapsodizes about old cars. “Chevrolet” sticks out like a gas guzzler at a nature reserve: It’s long, loud, and dirty, a celebration of everything the rest of the record rejects. It’s always been a bit difficult to reconcile Young’s environmental advocacy with his love of automobiles, and a close listen to “Chevrolet” reveals that he too is attempting to square that circle. Over the course of its 15 minutes, Young takes stock of what’s been lost over the past 50 years, still exalted by the open roads but reconciled that it’s now a memory: “Gone is crowded highway, lost are the roads we left behind/Found in the place they live inside me.” With that line, the connection between “Chevrolet” and the rest of World Record is clear: It’s an album of acceptance, where Young takes a look at his life and his planet and decides there’s still a lot of love.


Producer on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint has an uncanny knack for sculpting organic-sounding beats.

Ardour

Teebs has been billed as someone who benefits from his dues-paying backstory. He's a visual artist turned musician, he shared an apartment building with mentors Flying Lotus and Samiyam, and he put together his first Brainfeeder release, Ardour, over a two-year stretch that saw his father pass away. Run in certain beat-geek circles, and you might start getting an idea of what his deal is just from those details. But who Teebs knows, how he came up, the creation process, what scenes he's echoing off and adding to-- well, it's important, but there's something about Ardour that makes it feel like it has no manmade origin. Think of a building that's been left unattended for 100 years, and all of the foliage that pushes up through it and engulfs its crumbling foundations. For all the artisanal care that went into this album's creation, it sounds like decaying beats being split apart by deceptively fragile yet resilient melodies, post-hip-hop production as a simulation of nature reclaiming concrete.
Here's what I mean: try and focus on a specific instrument when you listen to an individual track, and you'll discover that Teebs' manipulation has rendered it into something unexpected. That's a wobbly harp on "Double Fifths", though in the first few seconds of the loop getting spooled up, it sounds like an out-of-tune ukulele, and over the course of the song its off-time loops start to come across as precipitation rather than a set of strings. There's a trilling piano glissando on "Moments", tweaked at points-- drenched in reverb, distorted, subsumed under layers of percussion and hiss-- to halfway convince you into thinking it might not actually be a piano at all. Percussive elements are built in a way that puts kicks and snares front and center, but lets just enough supplemental backbeat elements like backspun loops, flowing chimes, and sparking electronic synapses bubble under the surface so that even the most minimalist rhythms sound mystifyingly busy. Such elements make songs like "My Whole Life" and "Wind Loop" into drum-rich tracks that sinuously trickle instead of straight-up banging.
A lot of ink and pixels have been thrown around trying to make a case for the idea of electronic music's organic possibilities, but Ardour actually captures the sonic equivalent of watching biological life expand in sped-up time-lapse. And no, that's not to say that Ardour is about as interesting as watching grass grow. Its methodology is subtle, but its mood is immediate. Maybe the best way I can think of to describe that tone is one of disorienting joy: It's wispy and gentle and a bit cheerful on the surface, but giving it a deep listen will bring forth some of the more complex and abrasive elements to the forefront. This music can be flat-out beautiful while still giving your head a jostle: The romantic soundtrack strings of "Humming Birds", the icy bells of "Arthur's Birds", and the digital bird-chirps of "Autumn Antique" are undercut by clicking snap-beats and bass throbs that sound like they're coming from a loose, twitching high-voltage power line. That juxtaposition of gentleness and heat makes Ardour a pleasant exercise in loop-chopping naturalism-- but even through all the foliage, you can still nod your head to it.


After the departure of co-founding member Larissa Loyva, P:ano's remaining threesome have returned as No Kids, changing course from 2005's ukulele-driven Ghost Pirates Without Heads for a debut that rivals the Dirty Projectors' The Getty Address in its art-saturated omnivorousness.

Come Into My House

No Kids are the non-children of P:ano, a Vancouver-based indie pop group who borrowed from an unusual array of influences-- from Broadway to post-disco-- over a catalog of three little-heard albums, one 7" single, and an 11-track EP. After the departure of co-founding member Larissa Loyva, P:ano's remaining threesome have returned as No Kids, changing course from 2005's ukulele-driven Ghost Pirates Without Heads for a debut that rivals the Dirty Projectors' The Getty Address in its art-saturated omnivorousness, though its appetites aren't always within its means. On Come Into My House, everything from present-day urban radio to kitchen-sink chamber-pop to college glee clubs serve as fodder for F. Scott Fitzgerald-esque depictions of effete East Coast student loneliness. This old beach house is an extravagant one, peopled by characters who probably weren't hurt by the housing-market slump.
Plenty of indie pop bands borrow from 1960s Motown, but No Kids' appropriation of contemporary r&b puts them in a lineage that runs from Orange Juice's Chic-style guitars and Scritti Politti's soulful balladry to Hot Chip's self-aware electropop-- and, alas, labelmate Hey Willpower's un-FutureSex-y Timberlake sounds, too. When the compositions are as engaging as the intricate percussion, as on advance mp3s like piano-based male-female duet "For Halloween" or the falsetto-frosted "The Beaches All Closed", songwriter Nick Krgovich conjures a world of empty vacation homes and full scrapbooks. The T-Pain-esque Auto-Tuning on "Listen For It/Courtyard Music" comes off as an eccentricity next to what sounds like bassoon, but Krgovich's protagonists have eccentricities instead of girlfriends. "Neighbour's Party" interpolates the slinky piano riff from Amerie's "Crush" as if it were a sample; the obviousness of the reference is a painful reminder that Amerie would be a lot more fun to hear blasting from your neighbor's party.
Of course, No Kids know this, too. "It's a dance in my heart," Krgovich and Julia Chirka sing-- not a night in the club. Opener "Great Escape" describes "wandering around the gardens on this great estate" with the band's Jimmy Jam-Terry Lewis fascination hidden behind lush orchestration, marching-band drum rolls, and quiet wistfulness. When the time comes for celebration on "I Love the Weekend" or "Old Iron Gate", Krgovich's melismas flit over Brazilian rhythms instead of icy-hot r&b. "Four Freshmen Locked Out as the Sun Goes Down" sets barbershop-style harmonies atop unobtrusive strums. Lyrical mentions of upper-crust academic life are about as frequent here as musical allusions to the pop charts.
In Fitzgerald novels like The Beautiful and Damned, the characters may come from the WASP elite, but their passions burn like the booze in which they can't help but overindulge. Come Into My House represents another side of paradise-- the yearning of the well-to-do young intellectual who doesn't do well when it comes to matters of the heart, the insider who finds himself on the outside (with his pockets full of saltwater taffy). The album could use a little more of Fitzgerald's fiery extremes, and a bit less of meandering disappointments like "You Looked Good to Me" or "Dancing in the Stacks", but at its best it's a clever piece of musical storytelling by a band unintimidated by genre.


The Britrock survivors’ first album in 11 years is the sound of men in their 50s channeling the memories of their teens through the music of their 30s.

The Universal Want

The transformative power of sound has served as the subtext for basically every song Doves have ever written. On “Cathedrals of the Mind,” it’s the entire text. The band’s Jimi Goodwin describes the third single from The Universal Want as “a prayer to sonics,” a recollection of ravers “going insane” in an open field as soundsystems blast at ego-crushing volumes. When the trio behind erstwhile dance project Sub Sub reinvented themselves as a vaguely mysterious and very grandiose Y2K Britrock band on their 2000 debut Lost Souls, there’s no way they  would’ve allowed themselves to be so literal. That they can now is proof of concept for the band’s first album in 11 years: men in their 50s channeling the memories of their teens through the music of their 30s.
Merely by sounding much like other Doves albums, Universal Want is nostalgic. Though their first single was a booming, nearly eight-minute statement of intent, Doves’ debut made for a notable break from the Glastonbury giants then being felled by various forms of ego and bloat. And while Lost Souls and its follow-up The Last Broadcast topped the UK charts, the British press, “desperate for something to kick us out of the stupor of the previous two or three years,” quickly flocked towards the more tabloid-friendly Strokes and Libertines. For a time, Doves were at least perceived as being cooler or less crassly commercial than Coldplay—praise that eventually seemed shortsighted when comparing the technicolor splendor of the Brian Eno-produced Viva La Vida to 2009’s Kingdom of Rust.
As most of their peers have either shuttered or grown into the middle-age MOR tag, Doves seem to see their own continued existence as a form of defiance. “If you gotta believe in someone, don’t make that person me,” Goodwin sniffs on “Prisoners,” which seemingly advocates for rioting within the cell walls of your own life. It’s an unusually bristling sentiment, especially within the swirling, string-laced strums. Doves aren’t just picking up where they left off, but actively invoking their two earliest and most beloved albums. Both Lost Souls and Last Broadcast announced themselves with a portentous intro leading into a bracing, percussive mission statement; The Universal Want does the same. A cracking Tony Allen breakbeat serves as the selling point of “Carousels,” though Doves aren’t really riding the rhythm or working within a pocket. The sample dominates an already crowded mix, but maximalism is the point: “Carousels” works as a recreation of the competing nostalgias in Goodwin’s lyrics. It’s not meant to sound like the future, more, “they don’t make ’em like this anymore.”
The same could’ve been said in 2005 or 2009, when Some Cities and Kingdom of Rust arrived to increasingly muted receptions. Some of the critiques still hold true: As always, the midsection gets a bit soggy, one guitar overdub is never enough, and while Godwin’s vocals have an appealing, worn grain, they’re also incapable of modulation. But The Universal Want troubleshoots wisely—keep the tempos at a brisk jog, dabble in Afrobeat, Motown, and cinematic soul rather than prog, and watch the clock. Whereas Kingdom of Rust felt like twice its hourlong runtime, Universal Want is Doves’ first filler-free album, floating by like a warm breeze.
It also leaves about the same impression: In the moment, Doves’ candor and lyrical clarity on the title track are a welcome shift for a band whose personality is mostly divined from its production choices. Yet it’s the punched-in, drum-machine bounce of “I Will Not Hide” that lingers more than its hook; the mere attempt at making “Mother Silverlake” the grooviest Doves song is more memorable than the melody. The twinkling icicle lights of guitar that twist around the chorus of “Carousels” render its lyrics redundant at best. Despite their rep as throwback, album-oriented studio geeks, 2010’s The Places Between proved that Doves are a frequently transcendent singles band. The Universal Want lacks the take-on-the-world bullishness of “There Goes the Fear,” the cinematic sweep of “The Man Who Told Everything” or “Caught By the River,” or a chorus that could translate as easily to a jazz-pop cover as “Catch the Sun.” These are the kind of songs that might have driven Doves fans to the same ecstatic highs that Goodwin describes on “Cathedrals of the Mind,” but The Universal Want understands that those same people probably can’t experience that sensation anew, just fondly remember it.

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The debut solo album from the former lead singer of Priests feels caught between reality and nightmare, balancing dissonant soundscapes against an eerie, self-possessed sense of calm.

Barbarism

Since 2015, Katie Alice Greer has released solo music as KAG. Then she realized her Twitter algorithm was flooded with MAGA content: Turns out KAG is also short for “Keep America Great.” The grossly ironic overlap highlighted one reason why Greer has adamantly resisted describing her music as “political.” Everything is political; the word’s value as a descriptor has lost its potency. Greer recognizes that our vocabulary hasn’t evolved as fast as conditions have deteriorated. But her music melts the myth of American order into a hot waxy soup. Her debut solo album, Barbarism, casts a bleary yet charged gaze on recent history. These 11 songs feel caught between reality and nightmare.
As the former lead singer of Washington, D.C. punky-tonk group Priests, Greer is known for sharply polemical words delivered with a bratty wail or an operatic howl. But on Barbarism she sounds possessed. It’s unnerving how calm she is over the noisy drone of “Fake Nostalgia,” where she sings about “a simpler time” and “a sense of certainty that was never mine.” Her chilling composure stands out, harnessing the mindset of those fixated on going back, whether to a pre-pandemic normal or an antebellum fantasy. The contrast between the industrial background and her rose-tinted vocals illustrate the futility of looking to the past while the present is on fire. Despite her brainwashed tone, Greer is trying to escape the trap: “I don’t want to go back to some old life,” she sings. She’s calling from an alternate dimension, trying to break through a Twilight Zone mirage.
This extreme pivot from Priests’ serrated rockabilly-punk isn’t new for Greer; she’s already penned throbbing industrial electronic music about Diana Ross and lo-fi surf grunge inspired by the 1947 film Black Narcissus. “FITS/My Love Can’t Be,” the new album’s paranoid opener, is the closest Greer comes to hooky post-punk here. “There’s been a lot of talk about what happens when we sleep,” she announces in the opening line. Later, she mentions surveillance and police informants. Maybe Greer doesn’t mean literal sleep at all, but the act of looking away: from the theft of personal data, the rise of citizen policing, or the erosion of privacy. Warped steam engine drums transition into a tornado of percussion—a stampede’s rumble, sonar pings, a tinny alarm, marimba patters, as confused and overstimulated as life in the 24-hour news cycle. Her voice is sharp, almost cheeky as she sings: “A spectator sport and more popcorn when you’re bored.” Unfortunately, that captivating, acerbic tone doesn’t reappear elsewhere on the album.
The sound of Barbarism is like a machine at work, but it’s unclear if it’s malfunctioning or operating at max capacity. Drums, guitars, and synths are ripped, mangled, and plastered back together with industrial glue. Fleeting melodies and cultural references float by like jetsam in the waves. There’s an unrecognizable sample of a Bernie Sanders speech accompanied by the click of a typewriter on “Flag Wave Pt. 2” and a slightly more identifiable sample of Dorothea Lasky’s poem “Porn” coupled with metallic hiccups on “No Man,” which takes its title from John Donne. “There was no cotton in England to grow/A million miles away and a big bank loan,” Greer sings in a silvery tone, a brief, impressionistic history of American opportunism. “I know in my bones/I am entitled to something.”
Barbarism is a deranged playground, a portal to uncomfortable feelings in an increasingly uncomfortable world. Like a half-remembered dream, it seems to continuously promise access to hidden answers, if only we could penetrate the chaos. And though it’s grating, uneven, and perplexing, Barbarism feels familiar. Lansky, the poet, has talked about the compassion of art that appeals to our impulse for evil. “This sense of the demonic is beautiful because it has to care about who it’s targeting,” she said. “It’s a way to seduce the reader into an intimate place. That’s all a demon wants. It wants to be heard like any other restless spirit.” On Barbarism, Greer is possessed by the uncomfortable and the alien. Falling into her world, it’s hard not to be possessed in return.


Sweeter and more inviting than anything she’s done before, the second-full length by Sarah Beth Tomberlin finds peace in the unraveling.

Tomberlin : I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This…

I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This…

On her debut record, 2018’s At Weddings, Sarah Beth Tomberlin summed up her lyrical outlook: “To be a woman is to be in pain,” she lamented over muted piano and spectral reverb. “And my body reminds me almost every day.” The Brooklyn singer-songwriter often writes about characters who are constantly burdened: Whether they’re struggling with unrequited love or a Baptist upbringing, Tomberlin looks at small moments as a microcosm of larger, lifelong issues. Her 2020 EP Projections let in a little light, with playful songs about secret crushes and queer relationships, but religious trauma and fear still complicated the sapphic bliss of “Sin.” On her second full-length, I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This…, she loosens up and finds peace, if not quite joy, in the unraveling.
Working with producer Phil Weinrobe, Tomberlin surrounds these songs with layered percussion and lush arrangements, providing company as she struggles with isolation. Woodwinds creep in on “Unsaid” and synths throb on “Memory,” but even when she raises her voice on “Sunstruck” and “Stoned,” nothing can shake Tomberlin from the feeling of stasis in her lyrics. The percussive “Tap” is set during the first pandemic winter of January 2021, where she’s stuck watching mindless television and unloading in the DMs of people she hardly knows: “Talk to strangers like we already met/Even though it hasn’t happened yet.” Spirituality isn’t quite doing it for her either: A tarot card reading in “Unsaid” only makes her miss a toxic relationship, and a visit to church on “Born Again Runner” leaves her dissociating, “syncing my breath with the A/C.”
When Tomberlin’s songs leave the comfort of solitude, she reveals a versatility in her writing not always apparent under the weight of anxiety and depression. An uncertain dalliance on standout “Happy Accident” suggests the only thing more complicated than yearning for someone is actually developing the relationship: Across nearly six minutes, Tomberlin wrestles with feelings for a person who may or may not feel the same way. The unexpectedly funny “Collect Caller” swaps ambivalence for vitriol: “Collect caller/Don’t say you’re a baller/You’re a white boy living on your daddy’s dime.” A petty diss track towards a superficial “indie boy” sounds out of place on a record so emotionally closed off, but among these despairing stories of lost connection, his egotism looks even more shameless.
Vulnerability has powered Tomberlin’s music for years, and “Collect Caller” aside, these songs are sweeter and more inviting than anything she’s done before. One exception is the ending of “Stoned,” a fuzzy, pitch-shifted guitar solo that’s a jarring distraction from the record’s serenity. By contrast, “IDKWNTHT” is a strong addition to the canon of indie songs that sound like an adult coloring book, its major-key, looping chord progression evoking a nursery rhyme, give or take some expressive saxophones. Its tenderness is rare in Tomberlin’s anxious music, and rare even on this album. Guest vocalist and percussionist Felix Walworth of Told Slant provides call-and-response throughout the song, a playful, charming touch that feels like a sign of growth for a songwriter who has tended toward insularity. Even as she struggles to fight those instincts, the refrain brings a knowing smirk: “Sometimes it’s good to sing your feelings.” She knows, of course, that finding self-love is easier sung than done.


The third volume in this storied series of leftfield disco appears a few years after-- rather than, like the first two volumes, a year or two on the other side of-- a revolution whose most important battles have already been fought and won.

Various Artists: Disco Not Disco: Post Punk, Electro & Leftfield Disco Classics 1974-1986

What happens when the undisclosed past gets overwhelmed by the open-source present? Should we cheer or mourn? Is there a word, maybe in German, that accounts for both? When it came out in 2000, the first Disco Not Disco compilation begged no such questions. Other surveys had already started to recognize an alternative history of disco, but Disco Not Disco was the collection that made the pursuit into a movement. Part of that owed to timing: However much talk of old weird disco affected the weather in 2000, it would be another year or two before young upstarts turned that weather into a certifiable front. And it's worth remembering, now well into an age when fixation on genre plays as a vestige of an unenlightened past, just how new the notion of historical "disco" that was also "not disco" proved just a few years ago.
The original impulse behind Disco Not Disco was monumental, so much so that the formulation "X not X" has become part of music's critical vocabulary. But that same monumentality eats away at the new third volume of the series, which arrives on the other side of a revolution whose most important battles have already been fought and won.
Tangling with obsolescence is a great problem to have for an enterprise charged with rescuing the obscure, but still: James White's "Contort Yourself"? Delta 5's "Mind Your Own Business"? These are not songs that lack for anthology affirmation at this point, and their inclusion here marks a conspicuous absence of energy and purpose for a series that made its name on both.
That's not to argue against their greatness. Both songs are quite good, as are many of the other Post Punk, Electro & Leftfield Disco Classics included here. Vivien Goldman's "Launderette" leads off with the kind of walloping dub bass that played an integral role in post-punk's warming up to rhythm as a top-of-mind priority. Using that as a metric, Disco Not Disco 3 skews more directly toward post-punk than either of the previous two volumes; it's given more to bottom-up wanderings toward discretionary disco than to top-down digressions of disco itself. Shriekback charts the journey in a skulking track called "My Spine Is the Bassline", which would have made a good survey title if Disco Not Disco had not been in play. The ghostly horns intimated by Shriekback go on to tip the scales in Konk's "Your Life", which mixes tendrils of rocky rhythm guitar with flares of dancey brass.
The tenor changes with Yellow Magic Orchestra's "Seoul Music", a magisterial mood-piece in which the seeds of LCD Soundsystem can be heard rustling in the dirt of a planet starting to grow more futuristic in the early 80s. From there, more overtly electronic sounds figure into tracks by Kazino, Liasons Dangereuses, and A Number of Names. The last one comes with a caveat, though: Hats off to any compilation that makes room for A Number of Names' "Sharevari", but still: an "instrumental" version? The song in its full form figured into the story of disco turning into techno in Detroit, but the voided version here-- like Disco Not Disco 3 itself-- plays a bit too much like a hedged bet.


The New York quartet’s scant and downtempo album deftly uses stillness as a way to pull listeners deeper into the music.

frozenthere

To analyze Altopalo is to decipher a transmission from a faraway planet. The bass rattles and drops at a moment’s notice. Faint guitar chords clatter in the distance. The vocals are often garbled and unclear, tucked behind a layer of moody synths and staggered electronic drums. The band uses stillness to its advantage, slowly unpacking it as a way to pull listeners deeper into the music. The sounds are barely there at certain points, and you have to lean in a little closer to fully absorb its vibration.
That’s most evident on the title track of Altopalo’s new album, frozenthere: Amid deafening bass, the words of lead vocalist Rahm Silverglade are pitched higher and played in reverse; when coupled with a loop of haunting guitar chords, the song feels equally magnetic and disorienting. Then there’s “Pulp,” a visceral meditation near album’s end. Here, Silverglade pivots between low-pitched groaning and primal squealing, both of which convey the singer’s gut-wrenching torment. One can almost feel his pain, and see him writhing through the suffocating darkness.
frozenthere is a sharp sonic turn from Altopalo’s previous project, 2015’s noneofuscared, which skewed closer to funk and indie rock. Along with Silverglade, who’s released solo material on Terrible Records, Altopalo features guitarist Mike Haldeman (a member of Moses Sumney’s band), bassist Jesse Bielenberg, and drummer Dillon Treacy. Though noneofuscared was louder and more direct, songs like “loafly” and “goodnight (boom)” employed a mix of rock and ambient, and foreshadowed the band’s creative approach for this LP. frozenthere is scant and downtempo, drawing direct lines to the early work of experimental vocalist/producer James Blake and the remote serenity of Frank Ocean’s Endless.
Much like Blake, Silverglade uses his voice as an addendum to the music, sometimes filtering it to the background. Atmosphere is key here; the aura is more important than the words being spoken. Thematically, the album explores what it means to be human in a world dependent on technology, and on “Terra,” Silverglade seems to delve into the feelings of inferiority that social media can cause. “Scroll down to the picture lost in a feed,” he mutters. “Scroll down, countin’ thumbs, still dreamin’ of the hearts you hold.” The lyrics could have a double meaning in this instance; maybe the thumbs and hearts are digitized signs of approval. Then there’s “Blur,” a love letter to coveted photos: “I’m not alone when you’re so pocket-sized … frozen arms and legs can’t wrap me up at night.”
Throughout the album, the band captures the desperation of modern times, wagging the finger at cell phone addiction while urging listeners to find peace beyond the cascade of likes and retweets. Ultimately, frozenthere fulfills its premise as a rich suite of weightless compositions that float gently through your speakers. It’s a headphones record best consumed in the dead of night or just before dawn, right as the sky fades to a majestic blue, and life begins to rise from its slumber. The results are rewarding: You have to be patient and let it happen.


After the 2016 election, the Brooklyn musician embarked on a cross-country train trip that yielded an album that inextricably links America’s abstract political reality with the human lives it has shaped.

Book of Travelers

What is an artist supposed to do with the United States in 2018? Before it was even a country, this confederation of colonies was often defined by divergent opinions and experiences. But in recent years, what might have once (often falsely) passed for a civilized divide has widened at an astounding rate, into an inhospitable canyon whose erosive effects sometimes suggest a New American Antebellum. That leaves the artist with two unattractive options: address the national tension directly and risk making predictable and laughable propaganda, or write about almost anything else and seem privileged to ponder something beyond our urgent existential crises.
The Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and composer Gabriel Kahane stumbled headlong into this conundrum on the morning of November 9, 2016, when Americans were either waking to the news that Donald J. Trump would be our 45th president or still struggling to get some sleep after swallowing that fact. During the last decade, Kahane has explored the United States through an orchestral concert that mined government-commissioned guides to 48 states from the Great Depression, through an album that used 10 Los Angeles locales to ponder the country’s wider promise and perils, and through an early song cycle that drew on the works of a poet whose ancestors had arrived via the Mayflower.
Busy with a set of new songs about travel written before Election Day, Kahane had already booked a set of train tickets meant to take him across the United States in a serpentine journey of 8,980 miles stretched across 13 days. He hoped the experience would not only provide personal ballast for his project, but also give him a classic sort of front-row seat from which to witness the country’s fractious mood.
Instead, after Trump’s win, the journey and the conversations it prompted with strangers during that moment of national convulsion became the entire project: an immersive stage show, 8980: Book of Travelers; and his subsequent Nonesuch Records debut, Book of Travelers. Sometimes verbatim, like an anthropologist, and sometimes with the long-distance gaze of a poet, Kahane relays the stories of the people he met and the patchwork portrait of the United States they form as if singing out his daily journal to the sounds of his piano. It is the rare piece of art that aims, for better and worse, not merely to suggest that political art is personal art but to interlock those categories inextricably, until the social systems and the discrete stories they have created become extensions of one another.
On a train, daily seating arrangements in a dining car are a dice roll, based on times and party sizes. Kahane took advantage of this randomness, engaging his mealtime companions with a simple, sincere mantra: “I just wanna talk to you.” Some complied, sharing deeply personal backstories that became, one by one, the backbone for Book of Travelers. “Crawling back toward the national pain/I’m a city boy swimming in the Laramie Plain,” he sings with élan during “8980,” the album’s deeply blue but swaggering theme song. “Looking for something: What it is?”
Like his frequent collaborator Sufjan Stevens, Kahane has the rare ability to turn arcane information into winning tunes. On the tragic “Baltimore,” he shapes facts about Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and its Civilian Conservation Corps into a crystalline verse, where every young man is given “an ax and a seed… a pack and a tree.” “Baedeker” morphs maps and anecdotes from a ponderous early-20th-century guidebook into an anthem with internal architecture as majestic as some grand cathedral. That he’s able to do this with nothing more than a few keyboards, subtle effects, and his sensitive voice makes Kahane’s melodies and performances here all the more remarkable; there are no gilded strings or cascading choirs to sweep you along, just stories translated into exquisite little songs.
Most of these 10 tales relate quiet, common tragedies whose very quotidian nature communicates some national truth—the Christian mother whose devotion unintentionally enables her son’s fatal opioid addiction, contrasted with the couple that has found its own vision of heaven on a sliver of preserved coastline. There is a sketch of the country’s shambolic healthcare system and an indictment of the xenophobia beneath its melting pot façade, delivered with the details of actual experience.
Kahane interlaces these personal histories with his own. The album’s prelude, “November,” pulls the audience from the end of his last record, the Los Angeles-centric The Ambassador, to the train station. While everyone gawks at post-election news, he daydreams of a surrealistic trip where he might see the continent through the ages in an instant. Later, in the stunning two-song suite “October 1, 1939/Port of Hamburg,” he sings about his grandmother’s flight from Nazi Germany to the U.S., whispering and crooning fragments from her diary over jarring prepared piano. Then, he turns the infamous practice of banning refugee ships from docking in American ports, which began just after her arrival, into a startling allegory for current headlines.
Perhaps this seems precious, the reporter embedding himself so deeply within his reports. But these moments constitute Kahane’s most ingenious trick: By inserting himself and his family into the songs he’s distilled from the train, he suggests that any of us could have been onboard—and that all of us have been, at some point, uplifted or injured by our national ideals and forever-new deals. There’s strength in recognizing and integrating the multiplicity of a country’s voices, he asserts, in understanding the everyday and everlasting impacts of political choices.
Kahane’s family history with America’s tradition of imbalanced justice can make his quest to find homegrown goodness on the rails frustrating. The heartbreaking “What If I Told You” shares the lunch-car testimonial of a wealthy black woman named Monica. Her family has risen from the bowels of Southern slavery to the upper class and the Ivy League, but she’s taking the train to a funeral in Mississippi because her sons fear racial violence along “a stretch of farm-stand highway”—in the United States, in 2016. Elsewhere, Kahane points out that we still refuse plenty of religious refugees and neglect our most vulnerable people.
In a rare feel-good moment, however, Kahane reflects on singing with strangers aboard the train and the communion it offers. “Is difference only distance from the people I don’t know?” he asks. This is as close to a thesis statement as Book of Travelers ever gets. But the question scans like some vapid Super Bowl commercial that insists we have too much in common to argue (or take a knee), softening in an instant the hard truths Kahane has demanded we hear. His songs can sound polite to a fault: In his slight croon, each vague query feels like a forced smile—an attempt to avoid drawing the correct conclusion because it may offend someone. In its search for an anchoring idea, the album only finds well wishes.
Kahane’s struggle to locate the common thread, or at least pull it taut, rings true for me. A few months after he finished his journey, I began one of my own, traveling across the continent in part to search for something to cherish within a United States that seemed so disunited. Kahane moved 8,980 miles over 13 days on a train that stopped only at predetermined destinations; I went 66,350 miles in 15 months inside an RV that stopped anywhere that looked interesting. Still, despite the scope of my journey, I too have fought to communicate what I found out there in the United States. Some days, I am convinced it is a land worth saving, an expanse of endless possibility; other days, I think it is already gone, a wonderland stripped of so much it once offered. Both pronouncements seem too reductive.
Intentionally or not, what Book of Travelers articulates best is that there are no easy answers, no surefire predictions regarding national doom or deliverance. Kahane expresses the confusion of looking for the best in your fellow citizens but often reckoning with their worst—pervasive racism and uncaring capitalism, our failure to learn from history and our obsession with gratification in the moment. You keep looking anyway. Like the United States itself, Book of Travelers seems stuck in limbo about what it values most, about what it should accept or abhor. Both album and country teeter on a precipice above that inhospitable canyon, even as they keep chugging like trains along its edge.