With their vicious debut LP, Austin quartet Expander ascend to the Texas thrash pantheon, evoking familiar metal-punk sounds as well as dystopian sci-fi themes.

Endless Computer

Describing themselves as “timezapped neuropunks,” Austin thrash quartet Expander take on the image of space pirates who have seen the future and left it behind. They draw upon Voivod’s dystopian science fiction themes and the metal-punk of fellow Austin band Impalers, as well as the punkier side of West Coast metal polymaths VHÖL. With their Kurt Ballou-produced debut full-length Endless Computer, they have ascended to the Texas thrash pantheon alongside Iron Age and Power Trip. Expander forge a new path from familiar thrash elements and present them in an alienated context that is as hard-charging as it bewildered and contemplative.
“Biochron Space Suit,” the opening track, is pretty much everything you want from a thrash track in 2017. There’s General Ham’s rabid snarl alongside Ballou’s feedback frays, tipping guitarist Guzzler’s razor-pointed riffing over the edge. Drummer Keymaster—the one clad in a cyborg bodysuit here—bashes away with hardcore ethos and learned finesse. “Biochron” is conscious of its ripping, and it makes no bones about proving its case to you. “R-Type 2 Civilization,” with a noise-rock flair from Swirly’s bass that is equal parts Motörhead boogie and Repulsion racket, is just as furious. In all their portrayal of humans subjected to machinery, Expander prove to be quite flexible and nimble. With that, Endless Computer recalls classic death metal’s cerebral attitude despite having little death metal influence, tearing through a psychedelic hellspawn without frill. Its progressive undertones are much less stated than something like Master of Puppets or Rust in Peace, with Guzzler opting for subtler tics that don’t get swallowed up in Endless Computer’s unrelenting fury.
Many great metal records in this decade honor metal tradition with small tweaks, subtle subversions, and homages of spirit. Expander presents the future as the past reconfigured, the same shell with a new, deadlier heart. Every Tom G. Warrior “UGH!” that General Ham yells is a tribute—yet they also sound like a human gazing, in awe, into a cold, mechanized world. Guzzler, meanwhile, unleashes loads of catchy crossover riffs. He’s an efficient guitarist who presents a linear path to the pit—it’s just there are many of these paths, and they’re going by at a blinding pace.
Expander can be difficult to keep up with. “Cold Orbit” is constantly heading toward self-destruction, and “Timezapped” is so hectic that a lurching wah-wah towards the end doesn’t stop it from barreling recklessly ahead. Even the title track, with a bouncy central riff that also draws from early Voivod and Motörhead, feels trapped in a whirlwind purgatory, with General Ham sounding at his most pained, only dreaming of running free. “Authority Spire” takes that torture and amplifies it, centering more on Guzzler’s black metal tremolo explorations that sprout throughout the record. Pain for pleasure is integral to metal; Expander puts a technological existentialism to it, pumping you with enough riff information to give you too much of everything you want.
Ballou consistently gets the heaviest tones from bands, and here, he gets Expander to think bigger, to derive unity from chaos. This is a stark contrast to most of the lo-fi black metal and esoteric death metal released on label Nuclear War Now!, a sugar shock that has no sweetness. Power Trip’s Nightmare Logic isn’t the only thrash record or Texas record that functions as a broad State of Metal this year: Endless Computer is just as vicious and forward-thinking, and it’s got an even bleaker look at the future. It suggests that our technology will become too much to bear, and we will be the ones to cause that. But despite its overarching despair, Endless Computer contains a tinge of optimism in presenting Expander as one of the best young metal bands to emerge this year.


Santa Claus, the Virgin Mary, and Terrence "Turkeytime" Terrence just got the shaft this holiday season. Why bother with presents? 2005's Tickle Me Elmo was supposed to be a chicken-legged Sri Lankan with so much sex in her self-spun neons you might as well get wasted off penicillin with Willie Nelson at a secret Rex the Dog show. But guess what? On Halloween she showed up in Philadelphia for her *Fader* gig, sat herself under a big fucking Christmas tree, and dished out free copies of *Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1*, the mixtape masterpiece she and Diplo Hollertronix had spent

Diplo / M.I.A.: Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1

Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1

Santa Claus, the Virgin Mary, and Terrence "Turkeytime" Terrence just got the shaft this holiday season. Why bother with presents? 2005's Tickle Me Elmo was supposed to be a chicken-legged Sri Lankan with so much sex in her self-spun neons you might as well get wasted off penicillin with Willie Nelson at a secret Rex the Dog show. But guess what? On Halloween she showed up in Philadelphia for her Fader gig, sat herself under a big fucking Christmas tree, and dished out free copies of Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1, the mixtape masterpiece she and Diplo Hollertronix had spent the 10 previous days putting together in his apartment. Batteries included!
So a large portion of her forthcoming debut, Arular, has willfully gone leaky boat here. Many of her tracks sound similar to one another: A 505 Groovebox queefs out splatty, farty beats and M.I.A. shouts lyrics of varying snark over them, sometimes even singing them. (Sometimes.) She's been irresistible in single land, but M.I.A.'s full-length runs the risk of seeming limited and discrediting her misleading but awesome "female Dizzee Rascal" tag, replacing that description with "Neneh Cherry, Mk. II"-- a label that has likely dawned on anyone who has seen the "Buffalo Stance"-like "Galang" video.
That is why this mixtape kills: The format fits M.I.A. perfectly. Her songs benefit greatly from Diplo's recent baile funk fetish (confer his recent Favela On Blast tape), some choice dub and American hip-hop cuts to break up the blaze to blaze and razorblades, and some flat-out brilliant mashups.
On the upstroke, "Galang" goes reggaeton; on the down, Diplo cops the song a Lil Vicious beat and a lil keyboard hook, and it's so whoa you'll have to punch yourself in the face to stop smiling. "Fire Fire" goes bam bam then walks like an Egyptian in a telling Bangles mashup-- the two songs play so nicely together they could be siamese, until Diplo misdemeans "Pass That Dutch" with M.I.A.'s snakey music box schwarma. M.I.A.'s "Amazon" coupled with Ciara's radio-friendly microcrunk squelch is an early highlight, though that squirmy synth on Clipse's "Definition of a Roller" makes for good freak, too, packing just enough snaggletooth funk to forgive those recent Neptunes missteps.
For a tape whose initial appeal was the instant and gratifying relief it brought to everyone waiting for M.I.A.'s full-length, Diplo ironically saves M.I.A.'s best cuts for last. "URAQT" is a jittery mess of flirting, territory-marking, and text-messaging (!): "You fuckin with my man and you text him all the time/ You mighta had him once but I have him all the time," and later, "U-R-A-Q-T/ Is your daddy dealer, cause you're dope to me!" For dessert, Diplo brings "Big Pimpin'" out of retirement to back M.I.A.'s raspy "Bingo": "Do you know what is on? Do you know what is on? Do you know how this beat is made in fucking Lon-d-d-don?" The song's obviously great, but between M.I.A.'s fierce deliveries and the braggart beat, it sounds weird and ominous, a black-hole closer to an album brimming with life.
Last week, Sasha Frere-Jones profiled M.I.A. in The New Yorker, spraypainting her as a consummate and naturally "world" artist. M.I.A. is silly, dancey, cheap, expensive, truthful, and utterly serious all at once-- just like the world (!). She's not exactly rags-to-riches (yet), but her pop carries unwittingly significant weight, and to potentially far more people than just a few hundred ecstatic MP3 blog readers. It's one thing for M.I.A. to be a "world" pop star; it will be another thing for her to release an album that reflects that backstory. For now, Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 takes that burden off of Arular: Diplo has actualized our hopes for M.I.A. qua world pop star, and we didn't even have to leave him cookies.


Rick Ross’ sixth studio album Mastermind arrives following a rough year for the Maybach Music empire. The collection shines when guest raps from the likes of Kanye West, Meek Mill, Lil Wayne, and Jay Z light a fire under his ass.

Mastermind

Think back on all we’ve learned about Rick Ross since his 2006 debut album Port of Miami. He sells dope off the iPhone. His girls look like money bags. He wakes up to lobster bisque and reclines to the finest crab meats. Ross has pushed pomp at the expense of disclosure ever since he teased a serviceable personal style out of the paint-by-numbers Miami-Dade pimp chronicles of his early career. But what kept these impersonal missives afloat was a theatrical kingpin flair that seemed to expand in relation to attacks on his dominance. In 2009, when 50 Cent unearthed evidence of Ross’ history as a corrections officer, he brushed it off and struck back with the deliciously plush and cartoonishly prideful Deeper Than Rap and Teflon Don. After a health scare on an airplane in 2011, he puffed his plume further with the Miami Vice villainy of 2012’s Rich Forever and God Forgives, I Don’t. Ross has spent much of his career running defense against claims he’s lost his touch, even as his kingly seafood diet has been usurped by diced pineapples, but he’s had a tougher time than usual in the past year, as threats from gangs, show cancellations, and a drive-by after a birthday celebration raised salient concerns about his wellbeing. A flippant line about spiking a girl’s drink on trap baron Rocko’s hit “U.O.E.N.O.” reportedly cost him a lucrative promotional deal with Reebok. His Maybach Music Group’s Self Made Vol. 3 struggled to connect with a national audience, while a series of fiery solo singles skirted the Billboard Hot 100 entirely. A proposed release date for his sixth studio album Mastermind came and went this past December, and while Ross assured fans he was just “putting final touches on the album,” it looked like the untouchable Maybach Music empire had hit a rough patch.
Mastermind finally lands this week tasked with saving face after a bad year. But God Forgives rode fans’ willful suspension of disbelief raw as Ross anointed himself a pirate, a king, and a president over an album adorned in the gaudiest of embellishments. It doesn’t help that Mastermind finds him slipping from character into caricature. Many of the song concepts here are wan, and much of the wordplay is spent. On “Sanctified”, he’s the “fresh David Koresh,” soliciting grilled cheeses and fellatio from concubines. “BLK & WHT” houses Ross’ third joke about the George Zimmerman trial (“Trayvon Martin, I’m never missing my target”), and the same song’s chorus drably quips that “a nigga black but he sellin’ white.” “Walking on Air” is fashioned entirely out of biblical airballs like “I’m into fashion, nigga, John the Baptist” (whose signature outfit is said to be the hair of whatever wilderness animal he managed to skin) and “Half you niggas Judas, I’m the son of Moses” (whose progeny were passed up as his successors in the priesthood in favor of his nephews). When he’s not falling flat on bad puns, he’s busy hawking his Wingstop restaurants’ lemon pepper chicken wings.
With Ross’ hammy tendencies fading from strength to liability, it’s up to label money and collaborators to save this thing, and bless them all, they tried. Mastermind shines when guest raps from Ross regulars Meek Mill, Lil Wayne, and Jay-Z light a fire under his ass. Wayne and Jay’s great chemistry with Ross proves mutually inspiring for both; “The Devil Is a Lie” nets a better Jay verse than can be found on the majority of Magna Carta Holy Grail, and Wayne’s attack closer “Thug Cry” delivers an intensity recent releases have lacked. Kanye rolls a fixation on Chicago drill and Atlanta swag rap cadences, a rousing vocal from soul great Betty Wright, spectral synths and sinewy lows from ratchet maestro DJ Mustard, and Ross’ trademark overindulgence into the regal pomp of “Sanctified” for the album’s high watermark. “Sanctified” is an outstanding entry into Ross and Kanye’s catalogue of stunners, but it never feels like Ross’ song. The same can be said for deep cut “In Vein”, where Ross cedes the reins to the Weeknd’s promethazine noir, showing face more than halfway in and skating after a quick verse like a guest on his own record. Similarly, “War Ready”’s bloodless, overlong summit with erstwhile Rozay nemesis Jeezy only takes off when the snowman touches the mic.
When Mastermind’s not clinging to famous friends, it’s thrashing at 90s classics for direction. Early on, following a skit playing 911 call audio from the scene of Ross’ shooting, “Nobody” remakes the Notorious B.I.G.’s unsettlingly fatalistic “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)”. Given a shot at breaking kayfabe and speaking on the incident, Ross largely opts out, spitting street rap boilerplate in a Biggie cadence he can never quite pull off. “What a Shame” references both Wu-Tang Clan’s “Shame on a Nigga” and Camp Lo’s “Luchini (AKA This Is It)” but brings little to the table beyond French Montana’s bratty “Hanh!” ad lib. “Thug Cry” fares better employing the Billy Cobham sample that provided the backdrop for NorCal alt-rap veterans Souls of Mischief’s “‘93 til Infinity” but damn near drowns under a melodramatic sung hook and more lemon pepper wing talk. Mastermind’s sporadic 90s flair feels cursory, but it actually saves the album from a glut of productions all too often beholden to the bleating synths of mid-2000s DJ Toomp and the moody, intricate sounds of Mannie Fresh. The album could’ve used a few more J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League burners and a trap house brawler or two to lift up the sluggish pace. It wraps in just over an hour, but you’ll feel like you’ve been through much more, listening from end to end.
Mastermind finds Rick Ross in the same predicament his mortal enemy 50 Cent experienced when they squared off in 2009. He’s badly in need of reinvention after running out of recipes for his gangster shtick, but he’s too set in his ways to change direction six albums in. Mastermind gestures at Ross inviting us inside his thought process on “Nobody”, where he intimates that he sends a decoy tour bus around the on tour while traveling via private jet, and “Rich Is Gangsta”, which doubles down on the story that his stint as a corrections officer was an intentional ruse. But the moments where Mastermind gives us William Roberts the man instead of Rick Ross the gangster flick composite character with the borrowed name are scarce, and he remains committed to dialing in good life platitudes that increasingly ring hollow. Mastermind finds Ross at a Truman Show moment: his character’s reached the logical end of its universe. Going forward, he can either break out or keep up a jig he knows that we know is way past expired.


On her debut, the breakout Houston rapper is determined to complicate her tough-talking persona. Not every stylistic swing connects, but it’s a blast to hear her growing into her talent.

Where the Flowers Don’t Die

At just 22, Monaleo has already been through it. Before the Houston musician became a viral sensation and Ivy Park ambassador, expectant mother and rising rap royalty, she was a young girl from Missouri City dealing with suicidal ideation as young as fourth grade, surviving intimate partner violence, and coping by developing a “fascination” with death so matter-of-fact that she once studied mortuary science. So even though she’s spent the past two years enjoying the deserved popularity of her gloved-up-fighter singles—especially “Beating Down Yo Block,” the 2021 banger begging to be blasted from a lowrider truck—success has made her somewhat circumspect, too. On her debut album, Where the Flowers Don’t Die, she aims to fill out the contours of an ascendant star, determined to complicate her tough-talking persona and detail everything she went through to get here.
From the top, Where the Flowers Don’t Die signals that Monaleo is serious. On “Sober Mind,” a slow boom-bap textured with piano chords, she raps about clear-headedness and vanquishing her darker impulses: “This little mind of my mine it take time/If I ever get to thinking too much I take five/I be damned if I let a bad thought take mine.” Her pensiveness is surprisingly traditional, hewing to the rap classicism that tends to intrigue old heads; here it’s about the timeless musicality of her words and the lilt of her sentiment. Monaleo replicates the approach on the deceptively lovely breakup flamethrower “Return of the P” as well as “Ridgemont Baby,” a gutting memoir over a Tom Brock sample in which she transforms a diss into a plaintive family portrait. “You bitches grew up with family dogs in a two-story/So in other words bitch you don’t know the half,” she admonishes her bougier enemies, and then: “What you know ’bout boiling hot water just to take a bath/We was four deep in a one-bedroom, you do the math.” It gets rougher and more resilient from there; she’s really been through it.
These tracks provide personal context and a deep backdrop for her punchier numbers, including “Beating Down Yo Block” and the Southern bad bitch anthem “Ass Kickin.” When she tells an eager but marginally useful man that “you gon’ pay for what Kirk did to Rasheeda” on the latter track, she raps with the same cutting cadence as the iconic Atlanta rapper she namechecks: succinct, consonant-forward, voice low and bubbling like pavement tar, elucidating the finer points of a cunnilingus pump-and-dump strategy. (Its video depicts Monaleo’s pregnant posse administering beatdowns at the OB-GYN, and cross-cuts to a fetus breakdancing in the womb.) Monaleo can be funny and tough, emotional and direct, broadly versatile in tenor and style with a distinctly Texan flair, and it’s a blast to hear her growing into her talent.
Flowers starts to swerve into the median somewhere around “Goddess,” featuring Flo Milli on a melodic, Kewpie doll flow—a pop play in the mold of Doja Cat that wouldn’t feel totally prefab if only a feckless engineer had accidentally deleted the acoustic guitar. It’s prettified by an ethereal cascade of synths and the theme, that God has to be a woman because dudes are so trifling, is relatable though well-trod. It also establishes that Monaleo has a beautiful singing voice, and her church choir skills are there to call upon for album closer “Cosmic Love,” where she declares she’d fly into “space with no spacesuit/If it means that I won’t get to face you again.” There’s that professed morbidity! (Memo to the queasy: Do not Google what happens to the human body while rawdogging space.)
And then—a Swiftian adult-contemporary song called “Miss Understood” pops up like promoted Instagram poetry. It’s meant to illustrate that Monaleo is “hard on the outside, soft in the middle,” as she sings, but going straight from beating down hoes to walking on sunshine is quite the jarring switch. The hardass tracks may be a front for a woman who’s seen some shit, but Monaleo has already established her complexities; a rote guitar ballad that invokes songwriting clichés about a hurt little girl feels like its own, different kind of mask. Particularly when that’s followed by an interlude called “Sauvage,” which transitions into “Cologne Song,” where our heroine wonders sweetly, “What kinda cologne are you wearing?” (This also evokes sour memories of Johnny Depp’s creepy Dior campaign, probably not what she was going for.) On their own, the undeniably great layered harmonies on “Cologne Song” gesture at innocent, early ’90s R&B—Shanice singing about loving your smile was schmaltzy, too, yet remains one of the best love songs of that era. But “Cologne Song” betrays Monaleo’s impulse towards surface-level lyricism when she can obviously go much deeper.
You could see this track sequence as a statement of Monaleo’s clear versatility, but it’s a better case for a sharper edit. So just when you’re contemplating her untroubled attraction to a man’s alluring scent (“I know it ain’t Axe”), she’s back with the gloves on, rapping ferociously that she’s a “thug ass gangsta bitch come get ya wig split” (“Wig Splitter”). Monaleo’s got a compelling story to tell—of her climb from the couch to become a “young rich bitch” with a shoulder chip, hardened by her experiences but as vulnerable as any of us when she lets the defensive pose drop. The instinct to flex her range is a good one, particularly at the outset of an already thriving career. Now it’s just a matter of finding the balance between boldness and platitudes, chutzpah and chaos.


Eight years after releasing his first UK bass single, London’s Arthur Cayzer offers a debut LP of ambient music whose invocation of canonical tropes plays like a love letter to the resurgent genre.

Here From Where We Are

News of a revival—of a particular sound, style, or trend forgotten by the mainstream—usually means only that the news-bearer hasn’t been paying attention. Adherents know better. Most of the time, these tastes have been thriving out of sight for years. But as much as die-hard fans may scoff at recent talk of an ambient revival, it’s hard to deny that contemplative, beatless strains of electronic music have become more active, and are enjoying more widespread appeal, in recent years. Pariah’s Here From Where We Are is just the latest indicator that the gentle genre is in rude health.
Pariah (London’s Arthur Cayzer) emerged in 2009, bearing a sleek and soulful variant of the UK bass that was then bubbling up in the work of artists like Burial and James Blake. Following the one-two punch of his debut single, “Detroit Falls,” and its follow-up EP, Safehouses, he surmised that he would begin work on his debut album “in the next year or so.” But what he described as “pretty bad writer’s block” must have been worse than he imagined, because that debut long-player ended up taking eight years. In the intervening span, he was productive, but not prolific. There was a quick run of EPs, all for R&S, between 2010 and 2012; from 2011 through 2014, he and Blawan, a fellow Brit known for his brutalist techno, put out three EPs under their collaborative alias Karenn.
Cayzer’s debut solo LP finds him sounding like a different artist entirely. That’s good: In the early years, even at his best, there was little in his music that sounded truly original. You could hear him working through his influences, striving to create something true to himself, but not quite breaking free from the pull of his forebears and peers. In his defense, there was a lot of that at the time; UK bass exerted a powerful gravitational force. He finds more freedom in ambient music.
Not that Here From Where We Are sounds radically original; Cayzer is working with well-worn ideas. But ambient has been around long enough that originality feels less important in that tradition than it does in a supposedly cutting-edge sound like UK bass. In its invocation of canonical tropes, the album often feels like a love letter to the genre. The bright and triumphant opening track, “Log Jam,” is evocative of Oneohtrix Point Never covering Philip Glass, and from there Pariah surveys new-age drift, field recordings, the chillout-room languor of Global Communication, the wide-eyed chord progressions of Boards of Canada. “Rain Soup,” with its swirl of wind chimes and precipitation, sounds keyed to the current vogue for sound baths. The title track, with its major-key chords and veiled shimmer, carries the faintest hint of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks.
Cayzer’s keen ear and judicious touch are crucial to the album’s success. Ambient music, particularly when it’s this pretty, risks falling into a formless goop, but Pariah is good at creating tension. After “Log Jam” builds to a shuddering climax—the album hits its energetic peak just four minutes into its 40-odd minute run—its segue into the regal organ drones of “Pith” feels like leaping off a cliff and then hang gliding in lazy circles above verdant fields. “Linnaea” begins with slow, underwater strings and then moves in fits and starts toward the light, like Gavin Bryars’ “The Sinking of the Titanic,” but in reverse, with interlocking triplet and eighth-note patterns that gradually assume sharp, crystalline outlines as they play off one another. (If Boards of Canada make music inspired by the warbly, film-stock look and feel of vintage nature documentaries, “Linnaea” would make an excellent soundtrack for one of today’s hi-def explorations of the mysteries of the deep.)
It’s the interplay between those arpeggios that makes the song so quietly gripping: By almost imperceptibly shifting emphasis across his narrow set of elements—now it’s the triplets you notice, now the eighth notes, now a naïve, flute-like melody—Cayzer creates an almost narrative sensibility, never mind that the music doesn’t actually do that much beyond simply cycling in place. The same could be said for most of Here From Where We Are. Like all agreeable ambient music, it burbles away in the background, invisible right up until the moment you notice it—a little like the ambient revival itself.


Brittany Bosco’s latest project elevates smooth R&B and Afrofuturism from off the streets of Atlanta with an emotional, bop-heavy set of songs.

b.

The Savannah-born, Atlanta-based singer BOSCO is the kind of chameleonic artist who finds comfort in any arrangement. A product of the left-of-trap movement responsible for acts like Hollyweerd, the Pheels, Kona, and Janelle Monáe’s Wondaland collective, her sound is a linchpin that bridges all gaps in the local music scene—a storehouse of ingenuity eclipsed by rap titans who rule the roost with swagged-out turn-up anthems. Their omnipresence limits the popular narrative about the city’s output to slab music, amphetamine-positive dope-boy anthems, and their bubblegum derivatives. Inclusive of that culture but not ruled by it, BOSCO is the hybrid of modern Atlanta’s most important musical movements with the chops to elevate a different side of the south to a global stage.
First catapulted by the 2008 Spectrum EP, Brittany Bosco nurtured a national following with a sound influenced by Sarah Vaughn, Gnarls Barkley, TLC, and Janis Joplin. She arrived as a multilingual artist fluent in every modern chapter of popular music with an appropriately emotive vocal talent. Propelled by the single “Gold Ghost,” BOSCO floated gracefully above the tick of the trap on the 2015 BOY EP, channeling “Rock the Boat”-era Aaliyah and proving her capacity for the same kind of ambient around-the-way ballads that catapulted Ty Dolla $ign. She followed with 2016’s Girls in the Yard, co-produced with DJ Speakerfoxxx. Referencing house, stadium pop, and dancehall riddims, they created a body-moving dance-party opus that feted Missy Elliott. The direct lyricism, rhythmic alchemy, and experimental production that took shape across the preceding releases are perfected on b.
Recorded in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Los Angeles and described as an “ongoing art project,” the eight-track b. is a snapshot of BOSCO’s personal life driven by love, lust, and self-discovery. After the whimsical but forgettable opener “Adrenaline,” BOSCO sets the bar with the sickening breakup fanfare “Castles.” Delicate vocals collide with staccato piano and wobbling bass as BOSCO proclaims her freedom. Anna Wise joins her on “We Cool ” and their playful harmonies channel Hadley Street-era Solange as BOSCO muses about where she stands in the arena of love. Ditching the rose-colored lenses by “Cruel,” BOSCO applies a cold, satin tone to the aftermath of a love affair, leveling “So why do we cry, when we both know it’s the end?”
The project is a chronicle of her missteps and imperfections that finds BOSCO fully settled into womanhood and eager to take greater ownership of her life and work. By abandoning the “Milkshake” frivolity of Girls in the Yard and the brooding affect of BOY, BOSCO leaves herself room to embrace and explore womanhood in an environment that edifies the musical moments that reared her. Where the material is noticeably weak, a breathy, “too cool for school” timbre is to blame. She is adept at channeling Brandy’s smoky, understated runs and the disaffected charm of alt-rock, but missing is a more nuanced range—a shame, but it’s something that exists all over her previous work.
Nevertheless, BOSCO originates from the space where black music breaks away from the “urban” monolith. Underground and mainstream ideals coexist within each arrangement on b. because she, herself, has never chosen a side. She is crucial to the musical arc of Atlanta and the evolution of black music precisely because of this. Standing at the intersection of the old Atlanta and the Afro-future, BOSCO is the author of an avant iteration of the A-Town sound and b. positions herself to be the city’s title contender instead of just your fave’s fave.


On stage, the Bristol quartet combines a DJ’s instinct for pacing with a rock band’s penchant for volume. The group’s debut LP strikes a trickier balance between control and abandon.

Void

A good DJ is a conductor of limbs. With the twist of a knob from their podium, they can sculpt the arrangement of bodies on the dancefloor like a theremin player plucking melodies from thin air. Bristol quartet SCALPING are in many respects a rock group, but they approach their concerts like nightclub overlords, designing their blistering sets like extended trance pieces. Self-described as “a live band playing industrial techno,” SCALPING combine the traditional tools of rock music with electronic processing to craft dimensional, steely sound circuits. Their method evokes the mechanics of a Transformer—an intricate machine springing from a mundane hunk of metal. On Void, their debut full-length, SCALPING channel a sense of precision into their songwriting, but they lose some of the intensity that makes their live shows so electrifying.
In the attempt to erase the boundaries between hard rock and techno, SCALPING detach their music from corporeal appearances. When they play, each member is visible only in silhouette. Guitarist Jamie Thomas, bassist James Rushforth, drummer Isaac Jones, and electronics mastermind Alex Hill are obscured on the dark stage, backlit by a screen flashing with visual artist Jason Baker’s cyborgian digital renderings. The faceless musicians disappear into their nonstop concerts, which they arrange as meticulously as DJ sets. SCALPING gradually build the tempo from 80 bpm to 140, then drop back down to 70 to achieve maximum kinetic response from the heaving crowd. As composers and, indirectly, choreographers, SCALPING are extremely calculated. “Nothing’s an accident,” the band has said, admitting that, like Rivers Cuomo, they write songs on spreadsheets.
SCALPING are devoted to minutiae, but more than anything, they want their music to be “extreme.” There are moments on Void that rattle and scorch—the glitchy, robotic pulse of “Over the Walls,” the blown-out bass on “Cloak & Dagger”—but the album often feels reined in. This is possibly due to the fact that SCALPING, a band so invested in their live sound, recorded the entire LP remotely during lockdown. Even they seem to have realized the limitations of that approach: “I don’t think we’ll ever make a record in this way again, without being in the same room at all,” Jones recently told NME.
Void’s tamest stretches, the loping “Desire” and the nu-metal indebted “Tether,” can be partly cured with volume; in fact the entire album should be played at full blast. But at moderate levels, “Desire”—a rigid network of sequenced bleeps, processed guitar, and subdued percussion—feels like a discarded theme from Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy score. It is competent but not particularly innovative or extreme. With its searing guitars and pummeling beat, “Tether” is heftier, but the vocals from Oakland-based artist Daemon feel tacked on. His dreary, conversational delivery has a dampening effect, like a hand absorbing the clang from a crash cybmal. Rather than engulf the singer with their own grit and squall, SCALPING take the backseat on their own track, while Daemon sounds like he wandered over from another band.
If SCALPING craft their live shows as continuous arcs of noise, it makes you wonder why they didn’t replicate that tactic on Void. Some songs bleed into each other, but the album also has gaps between many of its tracks, making it feel like a more traditional rock album than an experiment in fusing genres. Two of its best cuts together feel like one evolving piece. Openers “Blood Club” and “Caller Unknown” are cinematic in their detail—buzzsaw guitars, dubbed-out drums, and metallic synths plunge you into a grimy tech noir, evoking the neon-lit back alleys of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The two songs are wired together by souped-up screeching, one of the album’s most powerful, ear-shredding effects.
SCALPING snap back to this voltage on closer “Remain in Stasis,” which features Bristol’s Grove. Unlike Daemon’s dull, glued-on flow, Grove’s vocals are embedded in the mix like shining flecks in granite. Their voice glides through SCALPING’s gauntlet, dissolving under sizzling distortion and yielding to punishing, rubbery arpeggios. Here, SCALPING achieve perfect synergy between intensity and precision. With rigorous control, they choreograph chaos.


With stripped-down, ambient eeriness, the debut LP from this dubstep/dancehall crossover is like a mirror image of the Bug's London Zoo.

Waiting For You

The Bug's London Zoo aged well over the past year: It still stands as one of the more exciting albums of 2008, a roots-heavy dubstep/dancehall crossover with rib-cracking rhythms and an amazing guest roster of singers and toasters that stands as a remarkably distinctive collection of voices. But there was a surprise harbinger in that album, a song that my original review actually completely overlooked due to-- or maybe despite-- a stripped-down, ambient eeriness that offset the rest of the album's aggro-beat feel. That song was "You & Me", a strikingly delicate yet powerful collaboration with the soft-voiced singer/poet Roger Robinson. And about three months after London Zoo dropped, the creative partnership of Robinson and producer Kevin Martin brought forth a deservedly lauded single under the name King Midas Sound: the ghostly "Cool Out", which rivaled the best of Burial when it came to the more desolate corners of dubstep.
One year later, "Cool Out" has reemerged as the lead track off the first King Midas Sound full-length, and it's retained its impact-- assuming you can refer to the feeling of becoming slowly enveloped in abandoned-high-rise ambiance and serenaded by quivering, sweetly voiced murmurs as an impact. It also stands as one of the highlights of Waiting for You, or at least one of the most chilling moments; the fact that this album can conflate the two is a sure sign of where it's coming from. Every strength this record holds draws off the symbiotic relationship between Martin's beats and Robinson's voice, which adapt to each other in a way that the last two people in a barren environment might. This is dub production rendered as the final reverberations of a deserted cityscape, infused with a crumbling low-end that does for bass what a single fluorescent tube in an underground concrete tunnel does for light. And the voice decorates it like a spiderweb-- fragile in appearance, but structurally resilient enough to hold strong against the rhythm.
Robinson's singing sells his idea of zero-gravity lovers' rock like a champ, filling in the evocative cracks that his mostly straightforward lyrics don't do much to cover. The title track's lovesick sentiments are familiar, but there's this pang to his voice-- a bit disbelieving, bitter, hopeful and agonized all at once-- that holds the deeper meaning. And he's just as powerful on the other songs where he's called upon to invoke that lonely brooding atmosphere-- "One Ting" (sonically bleaker than the nano-orchestral lavishness of Dabrye's remix from the "Cool Out" 12"); the misty-eyed take-me-back begging of "Darlin'"; "Meltdown" and its heavy-sighing pleads for intimacy. Robinson does have an intriguing vocal counterpart on a few tracks in the person of Dokkeki Q member Kiki Hitomi, at her ethereally malicious best on "Goodbye Girl" delivering spiteful reprimands and Elvis Costello quotes with a scalpel's agility ("I wish you pain 'til you can't ever feel joy/ I wish you luck with a capital F, boy"). But the more remote and abandoned Robinson's aching voice sounds, the heavier it hits.
Not all of Waiting for You has that same ambiance, though it rarely rises above the level of a soft rumble. Martin's production forgoes the stereotypical dubstep war of bassbin attrition to let the beats glow instead of flash, and even when it approaches an actual heavy knock-- like the underwater dancehall bump of "Outta Space" or the smothered Mantronix boom-clap of "I Man"-- it still resembles the starker moments of *Mezzanine-*era Massive Attack more than it does something along the lines of Bug tracks like "Skeng" or "Warning". Still, a little something is lost when things digress from the cutting isolation that made "Cool Out" work, especially when Robinson breaks from his singing to issue scoffing spoken-word holistic reprimands on "Earth a Kill Ya"-- a decent bit of preaching with a heavy scowl of a beat beneath, but oddly harsh and self-assured on a record that thrives on sounding vulnerable.


On her first album in five years, the singer-songwriter meditates on love, grief, and motherhood with vibrant melodies and newfound perspective.

Love Will Be Reborn

Martha Wainwright has referred to Love Will Be Reborn as her “middle coming-of-age” album, and it’s easy to see why: It’s the 45-year-old songwriter’s first record in five years, and the songs are heavy with acceptance and farewells, most notably to a decade-long marriage. It’s also Wainwright’s only album to make no overt mention of her illustrious parents or brother—songwriters Loudon Wainwright III, the late Kate McGarrigle, and Rufus Wainwright—and the many conversations she’s had with them through her own work. Love Will Be Reborn feels at once bigger and smaller than her previous material, with each quiet rumination leading her toward grander musings on love, grief, and motherhood.
Despite these departures, Wainwright revisits many familiar themes: her instinctive desire to be a good person (“I want to do right”) and the fatigue in her heart (“I know I’ll never believe in you again”). This time, she’s mostly alone, arriving at these thoughts through monologues to the air, to God, and to the redemptive power of rock’n’roll. There’s less storytelling, a turn from the accusatory tone she favored in the past, which she recently characterized with typical self-deprecation: “‘Oh, you did this [expletive], how could you?’ da da da.” Personal grievances give way to a more existential perspective, while Wainwright’s raw, growling vocals assure us she hasn’t lost her bite; she’s simply found new ways to channel it.
In the past, Wainwright’s fiery excoriations were never simple indictments; they doubled as acts of self-empowerment that defined who she is in relation to the people she isn’t and doesn’t want to be. (Wainwright once called her father a “bloody mother fucking asshole” in a song that cathartically asserted her own presence among the “guys with guitars.”) On Love Will Be Reborn, she swears only once: “Don’t fuck with my kids,” she hisses on “Body and Soul,” amid harrowing descriptions of an abusive relationship. It’s a stirring climax, a turn to the offensive on a record that largely softens her abrasive impulses.
Wainwright’s reflections on motherhood also inform the most desolate scenes on the album—and in her songbook—to date. In “Report Card,” the longest track she’s ever released, Wainwright’s voice is mostly a cappella as she laments the absence of her children in the wake of her divorce, packing their “empty clothes into an empty bin.” In other moments, her voice is paired with echoing hi-hats that hang like drawn-out sighs, moving her forward as if by force.
Yet light spills in through the cracks. The lovely trickles of piano midway through “Report Card” resonate like a note of hope. In “Hole in My Heart,” with ecstatic, spacey synth blasts and a title borrowed from Cyndi Lauper, Wainwright pays tribute to love’s ability to touch even the most hardened hearts. And while catchy hooks have never been her focus, the vibrant melodies shine, buoyed by a wider, more adventurous palette courtesy of new producer Pierre Marchand. The rock opera switch-up in “Rainbow,” with its introduction of electric guitar, lights the stage.
“Why do I have to go on?,” Wainwright asks bluntly on “Rainbow.” “For the kids and the neighbors/For love and for song.” It is a stark realization, a direct response to a similar thought she shared some 15 years ago, in a song called “Far Away”: “I have no reason to be alive/Oh, give me one.” Traversing her work and her life in this self-referential way, Love Will Be Reborn answers old questions and carries her somewhere new. It’s not a place without struggle, but Wainwright dusts herself off with grace. “I sing my little songs of love and pain,” she announces early in the album. It makes everything just a little more bearable.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The rarities set rkives is a full-sounding collection that reads like a long-lost Rilo Kiley album from the early-2000s, a fact that will satisfy the many fans maddened by their late-career stab at the mainstream, Under the Blacklight.

rkives

There was a time not so long ago when social-media platforms didn’t track their members’ every move and stow the information in a steel lock-box for all of eternity. The proto-blog platform Livejournal, for instance, is a ghost town today. Try to revisit a deleted past life there and you’ll likely be confronted with a crying goat informing you that the account, and all of its entries, have been capital-P purged. Never to be recovered. Resurrecting those pages would mean unearthing legions of fans of the Los Angeles indie-folk band Rilo Kiley, whose final album was released in 2007. Rilo Kiley's frontwoman and former child star Jenny Lewis was, to my memory, a spiritual guide for one subset of the Livejournal community, who'd plaster her lyrics on their entries and profile pages with Belieber-like devotion. I think of Rilo Kiley and Livejournal the way some people think of Tila Tequila and MySpace.
Traces of that intense Rilo Kiley fandom pop up in unexpected places today. Like the arm of Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, which is inked with the glum charcoal drawing found on the cover of the band’s 2002 album The Execution of All Things. “I’ve listened to that record so many times. [Jenny Lewis] was a perfect influence then,” Crutchfield said in a recent interview. “Rilo Kiley is obviously an indie rock band, but she sings like a real singer, which is how I always tried to sing, too.” Rilo Kiley stopped making music in 2007, and the memory of their heyday has faded to a dull flicker. But Jenny Lewis can be found in the DNA of many millennial musicians-- women in particular-- making confessional indie-rock today. When Crutchfield sings: “I don’t care if I’m too young to be unhappy,” you might think of the former child star, who told the world at age 25: “You say I choose sadness/ That it never once has chosen me/ Maybe you’re right.” Exploring old-but-new Rilo Kiley material can feel like connecting vital dots in recent history.
There is no shortage of unheard Rilo Kiley material out there: Sennett and Lewis reportedly wrote 60 songs together in the late 90s, before they even formed a band or a romantic relationship. rkives is a full-sounding collection that reads like a long-lost Rilo Kiley album from the early-2000s, a fact that will satisfy the many fans maddened by their late-career stab at the mainstream, Under the Blacklight. The archive, which is out on bassist Pierre de Reeder’s tiny label, tells a story of the group before Lewis got an expensive haircut, before their music played in scenes of “Gossip Girl” and “Grey’s Anatomy”, before they signed to Warner Bros., before Ben Gibbard and Zooey Deschanel broke up (or even met). Before we collectively shuttered our Livejournals. The only thing that jolts you back into present-day is rapper Too $hort’s voice on a remix of the strident dance-pop track “Dejalo”, from Under the Blacklight. It's an outlier, and a reminder that newly recorded Rilo Kiley music is exciting in theory but would probably be peculiar and unlistenable in practice.
The majority of the 16 tracks have never been heard before, but their tone will feel familiar. “All the trips that take you there/ All the little white pills that you take will get you there/ All the compliments that you take, they will get you there,” Lewis reels off (she often narrates her woes in lists) on “It’ll Get You There”, a song that could very well serve as the companion piece to the beloved 2002 depressive anthem “A Better Son/Daughter”. There’s enough screaming and argyle-sweater sadness to date Rilo Kiley as an occasional emo band, but plenty of twang to reinforce the bridge they built to indie-folk land. There are uneasy love letters to Los Angeles that sound like they were composed in Nashville, and housewifely misery of Betty Draper proportions (“No one escapes their liiii-iiiifffee!”, small children chant on “American Wife”.) There is Jenny Lewis, just as you remember her.
And there is Blake Sennett, guitarist and subject of many of Lewis’s doleful lyrics, just as you remember him. Lewis told SPIN in 2007 that after the pair split six years earlier, she’d thought to herself: "I’m going to get him with these lyrics, and he’s not going to know. It will be a little secret every night on the road." Sennett eventually took on a reputation-- unfairly, perhaps-- as a wet blanket of a sideman, preoccupied with his own creative ambitions and bitter about the division of attention among the band’s members. He eventually pulled the plug on the group after their ill-fated final record, explaining later in an interview that he’d "felt like there was a lot of deception, disloyalty, greed”... things he “didn’t want to submit himself to.” Lewis’ (albeit minor) success as a solo artist likely salted the wound. “She’s meteoric and I’m... mediocre?” Sennett once confessed. He wasn’t wrong.
That whimpering persona translates especially harshly on rkives, which features a handful of tracks he sung. It's almost as though those songs, like the limp relationship post-mortem “Well, You Left”, were added to the collection to show how uniquely appealing Lewis was, to underscore her role as the heart and soul of the project. His voice is deeply, painfully unlikeable. In many ways, the gulf between Lewis and Sennett has become the gulf between Lewis and many of her most adored indie-folk classmates, whose music can sound meek or stale in retrospect. Next to Sennett’s crude whine, Colin Meloy’s overwrought attempts at poeticism, Ben Gibbard’s pallidness or Conor Oberst’s drunken antics, Lewis’ pain sounds downright lovely, her despair dignified.
Lewis’ pain and despair have always been unique forces, packaged in cunning ways. Six years removed from the band’s last proper studio album, rkives is a lens that magnifies the darkness of Rilo Kiley’s catalogue. Like their debut Take Offs and Landings and its follow-up The Execution of All Things, the collection relies on deceptively precious instrumentation and cutesy pop-folk hues to mask-- but ultimately, to highlight-- the sinister core of the lyrics. “The Frug”, a beloved early recording that appeared in a Christina Ricci movie, is perhaps the most darling Rilo Kiley have ever sounded-- but it’s a depressive tale masquerading as a cutesy dance diddy. “I can take my clothes off/ I cannot fall in love/ You’ll never see my eyes,” she says, once again with the lists. “I cannot do the smurf/ I cannot fall in love/ I’ll never fall in love.” Rilo Kiley songs are often like Edward Gorey stories-- they’re aesthetically dainty enough for children, but someone always dies tragically or has her heart broken at the end of the day. It's an appealing dichotomy that carved out a special niche for the band: Jenny Lewis proved that you can be a female singer-songwriter in the brutal, self-lacerating tradition of Liz Phair or Fiona Apple and an avatar for the arts-and-crafty Urban Outfitters set at the same time.
Sound familiar? Today the burden of that dichotomy sits most squarely on the shoulders of Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino, an artist openly indebted to the music of Rilo Kiley. When Best Coast's music began to circulate in 2009 and 2010, it sounded uncannily familar-- like the lovelorn Los Angeles ballads of a girl whose music I'd learned about through Livejournal. It turned out I'd been listening to Cosentino since our respective high school days, when she'd upload acoustic tracks under the name Bethany Sharayah. I liked it because it sounded like Rilo Kiley. "When I grow up I know that I will be something special/ And the people will know my face/ And call me by my legal name," she sung on one called "The War of Copy", mapping out her own trajectory. Cosentino, I learned, never deleted her Livejournal page, even once she became one of the biggest names in popular indie music, worked with Jon Brion or launched a campaign for Urban Outfitters. There she is, still with a bio that reads, "It's hard to celebrate with a headache", still a member of a Rilo Kiley fan community.


Songwriter Mark Kozelek's 130-minute epic is indeed daring and self-reflective, but too often he prides long stretches of bitter humor and anger over the subtlety of his previous work.

Sun Kil Moon: Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood

In retrospect, Sun Kil Moon’s 2014 milestone Benji was less of a breakthrough than a breakdown just before Mark Kozelek became definitively mean and petty. Even with Benji’s life-flashing-before-your-eyes earnestness (the repentance! the forgiveness! the laughs! the tears!), its lessons seem to have gone unabsorbed. Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood comes in at 130 minutes. This is after two Sun Kil Moon albums—2015’s Universal Themes, 2016’s Jesu/Sun Kil Moon—that left no one thinking, “I wish these were twice as long.” Kozelek knows that Common as Light isn’t an easy sell. In a particularly forgettable number called “Seventies TV Show Theme Song,” he admits, “All I know is this reminds me of the theme to ‘Barney Miller’/It wasn’t intentional, just adding a song on the record for filler.” It’s not the only lyric on here that simply describes what the music sounds like, or dares you to stop listening. These are by-and-large the most confrontational songs Kozelek has ever put out, but strangely they’re also some of the more exciting ones he’s written since developing his post-Benji spoken word style.
While recent records have found Kozelek lambasting his vinyl-collecting fans and putting the fear of God in the minds of bloggers who miss his Red House Painters days, here Kozelek directs his fury more broadly. He makes three things absolutely clear: he hates iPhones, he hates Twitter, and he hates the twentysomethings who read Twitter on their iPhones. If there’s a theme to this record (the way that, you know, acting in a Paolo Sorrentino film was the theme of the previous Sun Kil Moon LP), it’s that the world is fucked, man, so get off your phone and respect your elders (especially Mark Kozelek). Many songs attempt to reflect Kozelek’s anger following mass shootings to varying degrees of profundity. The awkwardly chipper music in “Bastille Day” creates an effect not dissimilar to Smash Mouth playing the intro to “All Star” on loop while their singer threatens the audience. This mode, as one might imagine, doesn’t add up to a particularly moving collection of songs.
It does, however, make for some surprisingly great moments. In “Philadelphia Cop,” which slowly evolves into a eulogy for David Bowie, Kozelek lands a bitter jab: “If you’re a man in charge claiming you’re a staunch feminist, then give a woman your job or shut the fuck up, Queen Bitch.” In the well-meaning “Lone Star,” he helps save a suicidal woman’s life and tries to convince North Carolina officials to amend their transphobic bathroom laws. The slow, ominous “Sarah Lawrence College Song” finds him performing a small gig for a group of college students, which obviously leads to him berating them for how much their parents pay for tuition. He replies, “That’s what Walmart pays me to use my music in commercials,” but quickly changes his tone: “Maybe I can go to their school one day too, ‘cause they all seem like really nice people.”
Many of these songs follow similar patterns: Kozelek snaps and sympathizes in the same breath. When he jokes with his colorblind building manager that he wants his tiles “gray… like your hair, man,” he comments just a second later, “Hey, I got a little gray too, I’m not picking on you.” The reason why similarly quotidian story-songs like “Gustavo” or “Jim Wise” hit so hard was because they resulted in double portraits: You learned more about Kozelek through his observations of others. On Common as Light, Kozelek fills the whole frame, increasing the humor and anger, but sacrificing the subtlety. If the diaristic style he developed on his last few releases has been generously compared to novelists like Karl Ove Knausgård or James Joyce, then these songs feel more like Larry David or, at their most vulgar, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
Curiously, Kozelek plays a ton of synth here—a foreign sound for any Sun Kil Moon record. “I’ve found that when you put an instrument in someone’s hands that they aren’t used to playing, interesting things happen,” he noticed in a recent interview. A lot of this does sound new, which is becoming more difficult as he becomes more prolific and the world catches up with him. Phil Elverum cited him as an influence for his upcoming Mount Eerie album, and you can hear pieces of “Carissa” in “Ravens,” just like you can hear “Sunshine in Chicago” in “Okkervil River R.I.P.,” or “I Watched the Film the Song Remains the Same” in Father John Misty’s “Leaving L.A.” Kozelek’s work continues to ripple outward, even as he retreats further and further into himself.
Just last year, a pitch-perfect parody made the rounds, mimicking Kozelek’s style to the point of tricking a few people into thinking a new EP of his had surfaced. The irony is that those pensive, guitar-based songs already sound completely outdated—representative of a different Mark Kozelek from a different time. Such is the nature of his work. Kozelek has always been his own most restless listener, and part of his motivation is simply to keep himself interested in making art, whether that means changing his band name, starting his own record label, or turning his own songwriting process into his muse. “Maybe you’ll hear it and think, ‘I prefer your older songs,’” he sings in “Seventies TV Show Theme,” “Well, maybe the world has changed and I’m not that songwriter anymore.” In spirit, Common as Light resembles his classic work more than he’s willing to admit. After all, his previous epics Rollercoaster and April were emotionally exhausting listens, unfolding with the intensity of a man trying to pack everything he knows into one record. As disorienting and overwhelming as any of Kozelek’s defining albums, Common as Light patiently reveals more of the artist to anyone who’s still paying attention.


Crucial marks the debut solo release from Bryndon Cook, a guitarist who's toured with Solange, Dev Hynes, Chairlift and Kindness. He's a student of pop history and a skilled musician, though not yet a great songwriter.

Starchild & the New Romantic: Crucial EP

Crucial EP

Twenty-three year old Bryndon Cook isn't a child of the '70s or '80s, but you'd never guess that by listening to his work as Starchild & The New Romantic. He carries himself with the air of someone who's studiously thumbed through his parents' record collection. He cites Prince and Sade as primary influences, and his stage name references P-Funk mythology. That said, Cook also has a foot planted firmly in the current moment. His resumé as a touring guitarist reads like a who's who of forward-thinking R&B and electro-pop: Solange, Dev Hynes, Chairlift, Kindness. He's equal parts laptop producer and pop classicist, a singer who sits comfortably among the mostly electronic roster of Ghostly International.
On his debut EP, Crucial, Cook (a former Pitchfork intern) traffics in woozy R&B numbers built atop dense, keyboard-driven instrumentals. Take "Relax," which opens with the surface noise of a dusty record that gives way to squelchy synths, a steady click-clack beat and Cook's layered vocals, pleading "I wanna get to where you are/ Where you are." "Slammin' Mannequin" throws a handful of '80s cultural touchstones in a blender—a Grandmaster Flash-esque beat, the romantic comedy Mannequin, a guitar solo and compact synth chords that recall Prince—and hits purée. It's one of Crucial's most successful songs, even if its chorus lands with a disempowering thud ("You can be my slammin' mannequin/ Rock the greatest fashions and let it in/ Who's to say that you're not falling in love with me?").
Speaking of Prince, the Purple One looms large over many of the EP's songs—hardly surprising, given that Crucial borrows its title from a bootleg of studio outtakes that's been apocryphally credited to Prince and Miles Davis. "New Romantic" is built around a funk-indebted, rubbery bassline; its climax finds Cook cooing over a weepy guitar solo. On "Love Interlude," he backs up his vocals with a soaring falsetto, singing, "You can't stop lovers like us/Run from daybreak to dusk." "Woman's Dress" asks some very Princely questions ("Will I ever be enough for you?") but delivers them with the sort of muted sorrow that's become Frank Ocean's calling card.
Crucial is remarkably dense for a self-recorded album, though it has a tactile, analog feel that belies its origins as laptop music. While the musicianship on display is impressive, Cook's songwriting could certainly be sharper. None of these songs have strong enough hooks to encourage repeat listening or stand out from the rest of the EP. As a personality, Cook also tends to get lost in all that texture. His vocals sit fairly low in the mix, and his words often get swallowed up by the backing tracks. His stage name and cover art hint at a compelling narrative—one imagines a sort of retro-afro-futurist Man Who Fell to Earth—but Starchild never really emerges as a character on Crucial, beyond a mouthpiece for mundane pop tropes. Bryndon Cook shows a lot of potential in synthesizing the sounds of his idols, but even so, Crucial remains a largely earthbound affair.


The octet’s latest group album, full of vibrant theatrics and polished posse cuts, is at times representative of Dreamville Records’ reductive homages.

Spilligion

Familiarity is both a blessing and a crutch for Spillage Village, a collective of vocalists and producers steeped in the folklore of Atlanta’s most prestigious rap acts. Their latest album Spilligion is a polished record full of rumbling basslines, posse cuts, and gospel interludes, with songs assuming loose themes of love, faith, family, and weed. The rappers spin yarns of fellowship and strife, like wayfarers commiserating around a campfire—a style reminiscent of Goodie Mob, OutKast, and blues stretching back some 200 years. Still, at times, the familiarity functions as shorthand; their success is hinged largely on whether devotees of Aquemini and Still Standing feel like making room in their disc-changers for a crew of next-gen disciples.
Spillage Village seems to understand what makes Dungeon Family transcendent, that their essence can’t be condensed to a vibe. But viewed through the prism of a Dreamville Records project, Spilligion can be representative of the label’s reductive homages. J. Cole has bankrolled a slew of underappreciated revival acts, including Spillage members EarthGang and J.I.D—both of whom released strong full-lengths upon signing to the label in 2017. That fall, Charlotte rapper Lute, another adherent of Dungeon Family’s blunted rumination, delivered the excellent West 1996 Pt. 2 to little fanfare. While Spilligion adheres to Dreamville’s reverent aesthetic, Cole’s long-running attempts to compress the most intricate elements of hip-hop’s turn-of-the-century blockbusters are evident in his protégés’ work.
Ambiance does most of Spilligion’s heavy lifting. Most of the tracks have multiple production credits, usually a combination of in-house producers Hollywood JB, Christo, Olu, and Benji. Their subterranean rhythms, bright guitar chords, and funky digressions recall Organized Noize not only in the abstract but also in their structural subtleties. On “Mecca,” the high percussion assumes the foreground, the background instrumentals slinking left to right in stereo. The danceable groove of “Cupid” ends with a jazzy keyboard outro, the programmed drums nimbly switched out for a live set. Big Rube, the spoken-word standby of Dungeon Family projects since Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, appears not once but twice on Spilligion.
“PsalmSing” and “Shiva” have hooks that take advantage of Spillage’s varied personnel, who each chime in with enveloping harmonies. Mereba, a prodigious neo-soul singer who also raps with icy precision, is Spilligion’s breakout star, her voice threaded through the soaring choruses. The album’s most jaw-dropping moment—and there are several—is the outro “Jupiter,” on which the assembled believers make merry in spite of an uncertain future: “So hold my hands and dance with me tonight/You know they say we’re all about to die.” It’s a moment of rapturous if fleeting contentment.
Still, there’s a tonal indistinctness that dulls the highs on an album that’s nominally about religion. Contrasted with Dungeon Family’s backwoods mysticism, Spilligion’s down-home Christianity limits its depth and thematic heft, and the verses can feel a bit paint-by-numbers when bookended by such sharp hooks. On “Ea’alah (Family),” which advocates interspersing prayer with smoke breaks, J.I.D bursts with gratitude: “Let me look into the sun, ’cause I don’t got no occupation/You can say I came from nothin’ but I found my destination.” Later in the song, Olu tackles the coronavirus pandemic: “I don’t mean to bother you, well yeah, I kinda do/See, we’ve been wrestlin’ with this nasty plague that’s kinda like the flu.” (It isn’t.) The brightness isn’t offputting, but it’s a long way from, say, Soul Food, an album about four young men surveying their earthly lots and invoking a God who didn’t always seem to love them back. Once you’re convinced of your own absolution, you don’t need to wander the desert looking for it.
Longtime Spillage member J.I.D is one of rap’s feel-good stories, an industrious veteran who transformed himself into a technical marvel through sheer will. A master of breath control and syllable placement, his erratically pitched vocals embolden his rhyme schemes, and Spilligion shows he’s equally adept at carrying a tune. He’s still coming into his own: his verse on “Baptize” (“She said it’s cold inside, that water made her nipples hard/That’s that liquor talkin’, sippin’ gin and readin’ the book of Genesis just before”) reflects the lustiness and overtaxed semantics of a J. Cole tangent, and at times his inflection is indistinguishable from Kendrick Lamar’s.
EarthGang’s Olu and WowGr8, for their part, have worked to avoid the fate of Nappy Roots and Big K.R.I.T.—genre artists who recognized their market position and rapped prolifically about grits and Eldorados over banjos and harmonicas. Rapping in animated fusillades, EarthGang’s deviation between conversational deliveries and idiosyncratic singing evokes Stankonia-era André 3000, and their scope has increased as they’ve refined their mechanics. For all its strengths, though, Spilligion sounds telegraphed in comparison to 2019’s Mirrorland, their elaborate world-building diminished by the big-group setting. When J.I.D and the other Spillagers assume frontman duties, as on “Judas,” the project’s vibrant theatrics and space-age symbolism are most conspicuously absent.
If there’s one thing the extended Spillage family shares, it’s an intense devotion to craft, which makes Spilligion an achievement. The absorbing full-length is a testament to the octet’s infectious spirit and remarkable technique. But even if no one expects Spillage to replicate “Inshallah” or “7th Floor/The Serengetti,” the miracle of Dungeon Family lay in their audacity to journey without a map. Like any camp revival, Spilligion offers a raucous, affirming experience that leaves you craving a deliverance you’d already sought.

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A fixture of the minimalist canon, these two singular psych-classical compositions snuck into '60s counterculture at just the right time.

A Rainbow in Curved Air

The hippies inspired a wholesale revision of marketplace calculations. Out-there experiments, previously indulged as pet projects, suddenly drew greater interest in certain media boardrooms. And that was before Woodstock demonstrated the scale of American youth culture to the country at large. After that long weekend, not every proposal needed to make complete sense to the entire executive suite. As Dennis Hopper’s 1969 directorial debut Easy Rider developed into a smash, actor Peter Fonda observed that film bosses stopped “shaking their heads in incomprehension,” the better to start nodding their heads with incomprehension. This same new taste for the unexpected also secured some leeway for avant-gardists laboring inside the major label system.
In 1965, composer David Behrman began working as a tape editor for CBS’s Columbia imprint. By 1967, his bosses trusted his taste enough to let him curate a series of albums that documented the American experimental scene. The first Behrman-produced LP included Steve Reich’s “Come Out,” as well as electronic works by Pauline Oliveros and Richard Maxfield. Half a decade later, Columbia’s “Music of Our Time” series would be defunct. (A similar fate awaited Hopper’s directorial career, after 1971’s astonishing and truly bewildering The Last Movie.) But in the operational time they had, Behrman and his colleagues at Columbia’s classical division introduced an impressive variety of artists to the label’s catalog, as well as to the record-buying public.
Terry Riley benefited the most from this small window of mainstream exposure. By the time Behrman discovered the artist performing in a small New York apartment, the slender Californian had the receding hairline and shoulder-length locks of an underground elder. Already in his thirties, Riley had fashioned a personal sound from an unusual collection of influences. As a young man, he made money playing barroom jazz piano. When simultaneously working toward a composition degree at Berkeley, Riley became entranced by the music of La Monte Young—a fellow student who scandalized the faculty in 1958 with a nearly hour-long string trio that contained just 83 notes. Young’s use of sustained tones in his Trio for Strings offended those classmates who were conditioned to expect speed and complexity in any ambitious piece of contemporary classical music. Riley, though, was galvanized by Young’s few, long notes.
When completing his degree, Riley responded to Young’s pioneering work with string compositions that also employed sustained tones. But he ventured new methods for their use, too. While Young’s Trio held fast to an atonal method of organization prized by European composers, Riley’s String Trio of 1961 reasserted the role of conventional tonality. His focus on quick modal repetition didn’t merely help distinguish his sound from Young’s inside the canon of music that would eventually be called “minimalism.” It also primed Riley to make unique use of the fast-developing field of tape manipulation.
By spooling tape through two machines—the first to record, the second to play back—Riley arrived at an early form of live-performance sampling that he would incorporate into scores for theatrical and dance performances. To create the pieces collected on the album Music for the Gift, Riley recorded each instrumentalist in Chet Baker’s band, as they played Miles Davis’ “So What,” then sampled and looped each musical layer to a point that made recognition of the source material impossible.
Later that decade, when the CBS producer drifted into the composer’s New York apartment, he encountered Riley’s mature form of improvising along with these self-sampling, “lag time” tape loops. Behrman remembered seeing Riley’s reel-to-reel recorder: “And he was performing saxophone with two Revoxes, with the tape running from one to the other. It just blew me away, I’d never heard anything like it; it was just amazing.”
Behrman’s first CBS recording of Riley’s music was devoted to *In C, *perhaps the most famous minimalist composition of all (which Riley wrote in 1964). Though because the core triumph of In C resides in the way its charms can survive the structure’s openness, the piece has been more influential as a score that invites multiple approaches than as a fixed-media recording. It was Behrman's second LP of Riley’s music that would have a greater impact as a stand-alone album.
Your ambitious, local chamber orchestra might put on a shattering version of In C, but no one has ever played A Rainbow in Curved Air with anything close to the composer’s authority. By capturing Riley as both a conceptualist and as a virtuoso performer, this 1969 LP revealed a suppleness that stands in contrast to the baggage associated with “minimalism.” The range displayed over its two sides reaches out to the world (and, yes, the cosmos) rather than sitting inside any restrictive aesthetic field. As a result, the album can simultaneously suggest a feel of hurtling liftoff as well as one of peaceable calm.
Side A’s heavily overdubbed title track features the composer on a range of keys: electric organ, electric harpsichord, rocksichord (also a favorite of Sun Ra’s), as well as two percussion items (dumbec and tambourine). Once the fast, opening pattern of “Rainbow” has been established, a series of placid chords superimposes a sense of ease. And then comes an explosion, a procession of right-hand lines that flutter and pirouette over the over the pulsing rhythmic patterns. That this powerful influx of energy doesn’t make the music feel cluttered or harsh is one of Riley’s compositional achievements.
Though Riley’s drug-assisted “all night flight” concerts of the period might focus on this piece for hours at a clip, the 19-minute LP iteration has a traditional, fast-slow-fast feel. A generally mellower second movement focuses on shorter high-register lines that syncopate with the modal base. And after a repetition of those delay-strewn chords—this time voiced with a searing edge—the final section of “Rainbow” accelerates again, thanks to Riley’s use of the dumbec, informed by his appreciation of Indian classical music.
Riley has always talked openly about his use of marijuana and LSD during early performances of this album, but there’s no mistaking his final results for being haphazard or sops to the drug-fashions of that era. After opening with a few minutes of saxophone drones, the loops that form the basis of Side B’s “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band” cut out—a choice that initially seems as disruptive as the first jump cut in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Like the filmmaker, Riley builds this technique into its own language. Once your ear is trained to recognize it, continued interruption of the drone feels like a vamp all on its own. The possibility of an unexpected, violent edit then hovers over the gorgeous, sustained-tone melody that “Nogood” develops after the opening drone-field disappears.
The composer’s integration of avant-garde editing techniques within a jazz-influenced style helps communicate this album’s roving, idealistic feel. The original LP’s jacket art featured a short poem by Riley that envisioned the Pentagon “turned on its side and painted purple, yellow & green within a plainly psychedelic environment.” Some back covers of CD reissues have done without this supplement. The erasure could be mere oversight—or it might have been a conscious decision made to help the record avoid seeming dated by any suggestion of Vietnam-era protest.
Unlike “head” movies and other cultural artifacts produced in the late-sixties, both sides of A Rainbow in Curved Air have long had an irony-free claim on contemporary tastes. The frantic but joyful electric keyboard texture of “Rainbow” was adopted by Pete Townshend on “Baba O’Riley” (the title of which gives due credit to its inspiration), and its psychedelic patterns were still modern-sounding enough to work as as “chill out” music in “Grand Theft Auto IV.” The artisanal brewers at Grimm Ales recently named one of their beers after this album. (When I told Riley this, during an interview, he sounded delighted: “They should send me some!”)
These cosigns in popular culture would likely be enough to commend the album to successive generations, at least as a footnote. But another signal of A Rainbow in Curved Air’s lasting importance is the way in which Riley’s innovations as a performer-composer changed American classical music. The composer-led ensembles centered around Steve Reich and Philip Glass are hard to imagine without Riley’s example (as well as that of Young’s). In his autobiography, the composer John Adams—one of the most frequently performed American composers of the present-day—recalls first encountering the “congenial hippie spirit” of Riley’s music. Along with the rest of the early-minimalist catalog, the simple fact of this aesthetic’s existence suggested to Adams that “the pleasure principle had been invited back into the listening experience.”
None of this was an accident. Nor was it the product of a cynical attempt to get in good with the Summer of Love crowd. This still-new language in American classical music has not always enjoyed the support of major labels. But the musical minimalism that Riley helped originate has nonetheless been a permanently joyous fixture in the American landscape, in part because of the feeling that Riley credited to his focus on modal playing: “My own spirit felt happy with it. I could do it for a long time and still feel good, still feel balanced and centered.”
Midway through Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson’s character notes that “it’s real hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace.” A few minutes later, he’s beaten to death. The explosive conclusion of Hopper’s film can be read as a self-aware commentary on the unsustainable nature of some hedonistic paths. By contrast, Riley’s “balanced and centered” approach to psychedelia consumes a wild energy without the chaser of destruction.
Once the hippie phenomenon ran its pop-culture course, and after Columbia lost interest in modern composition altogether, Riley self-published his own music for several decades. And he never burned out as a creative force. Now 81, Riley still composes for string quartets and orchestras with an intuitive, form-breaking glee. His live piano improvisations are still mesmerizing. The musical structures heard at these concerts—and on A Rainbow in Curved Air—are the product of his unique understanding of chance and design. The rebellious pleasure-seekers of Easy Rider may have “blown it” in the end, but Riley’s musical revolution has proved spiritually and artistically sustaining.


Seeking empathy for a younger self, Rina Sawayama’s second album pirouettes through pop-punk and power ballads, trance and stadium rock. It’s ambitious in the same way as putting on all the clothes in your closet.

Hold the Girl

Rina Sawayama’s 2020 debut reckoned sincerely with friendship falling-outs and familial wounds, but on its best song, the pop singer pretended to be a rich girl dripping in Cartier and cruising in Teslas. “XS” was intended as arch anti-capitalist critique in an age of climate crisis, but its luxe vision was a better sell for being the rich, not eating them; Sawayama whispered “excess” as if it were the name of a designer perfume, the scent of “more” intoxicating. Intention aside, a fabulous pop persona goes a long way. Even if Sawayama became the type of star who stinks up the Earth with her private jet, as long as she delivers fun hooks, haute looks, and damn good live performances, she’ll have people obsessing: “Bestie, what’s the skincare routine?”
Lately, though, the 32-year-old artist has been reading self-help books and having revelations in therapy—so her second album, Hold the Girl, is decidedly more earnest and weighty. Sawayama has framed the album as part of a process of “reparenting” herself, and the emphasis on one’s “inner child” may explain why the record’s imagery leans elementary: Blue skies and storms, villains and heroes, the feeling of being imprisoned inside one’s bedroom. She knows other queer people have also had complicated upbringings, so she nobly strives to create belonging: “If I can heal someone around me or someone that I don’t know with the songs I write … why wouldn’t I take it?” she reasons. The spiritual predecessor to Hold the Girl is not the blithe, stylish “XS” but the kindly, saccharine “Chosen Family.”
Another way to think about Hold the Girl is that it’s an attempt to merge the full-throated spectacle of Born This Way with the surviving-through-trauma emotionality of Chromatica. But there are plenty of other touchstones beyond Gaga, and Sawayama wears them on her sleeve: the dreamy contralto of Karen Carpenter, the puckered pop-rock of Avril Lavigne, the rousing, motivational tenor of Katy Perry. Sawayama’s tagline for single “Catch Me in the Air” is essentially “the Corrs if pitched to Gwen Stefani,” which doesn’t even get at the half of it. She opens the heartfelt tribute to her single mother with moony new age woodwinds straight from Céline Dion, then switches to Kelly Clarkson guitar strums: “Catch me in the air-eee air-eee air-eee airrr,” she sings in the chorus, as if yodeling while strapped into a rollercoaster.
Almost every song strives to be Sawayama’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” with genre mash-ups and key changes galore. The title track brings 8-bit video game flourishes to a 2-step breakdown, but there’s also the abrupt flare of strings, a country gallop to the verses, and a thunderous choral finale. Follow-up “This Hell” interpolates ABBA, tips its hat to Shania Twain and Paris Hilton, and indulges in pop feminist sloganeering (“Fuck what they did to Britney/To Lady Di and Whitney”). Even then, she can’t help herself, so the song climaxes on a gnarly hair metal guitar solo. Hold the Girl is ambitious in the way that putting on all the clothes in your closet is ambitious. It’s as if Sawayama heard the adage “kill your darlings” and decided it wasn’t slay enough.
SAWAYAMA could be overwhelming too, but it stuck mostly to a novel mix of turn-of-the-millennium pop and nu-metal. On Hold the Girl, the singer fulfills a promise to “mine even more left-field references from decades past,” going for pop-punk and power ballads, trance and stadium rock. A militant digital beat supersedes the plucks of what sounds like a Punjabi tumbi on “Your Age,” an age-gap relationship accounting akin to Demi Lovato’s “29.” The pairing is like grapes and fish sauce, and in the chorus Sawayama swings for Nine Inch Nails but lands closer to the shout-rebellion of GAYLE. (Rhyming “social suicide” with “a jail personified” does not help the cause.) It comes as a relief when you get to the chrome-plated “Frankenstein,” one of the record’s most focused, and thus best, songs. Sawayama leans into the dark theatrics of Fall Out Boy or the Veronicas, nervy guitars grounding the mania as she compares herself to one of literature’s most famous freaks.
The album fares much better in small increments—that way, you can better absorb the ketamine freakout on “Imagining,” the swooning harmonies on “Phantom,” the blinding club stomp on “Holy (Til You Let Me Go).” Sawayama’s 2000s pop-rock numbers are just the right amount of sentimental, like rewatching your favorite Disney Channel original movie. (This is true even when the lyrics are sometimes baffling: “So I create a storm and bury it deep, hiding the key/In plain sight, just in case I need help, help!” she sings on “Hurricane.”) In time the twists will feel less jarring. But repeated listens don’t open up the album’s logic—the simplest explanation for its aesthetic choices seems to be that Sawayama made them because she could.
Hold the Girl’s constant pivots make it hard to track its central concept: revisiting and empathizing with a younger self. Opener “Minor Feelings” sets the stage for a grand emotional reckoning, nodding to Cathy Park Hong’s landmark essay collection about petty, racialized feelings that never quite escalate into catharsis: “The more I keep them inside/The more they bury me alive,” Sawayama announces. But the pensive mood deflates as Hold the Girl immediately veers to dancier, more involved songs—and the album’s broad-brush lyrics leave little to hold onto anyway, despite Sawayama’s intention to emulate the evocative storytelling of folklore. The main exception is “Send My Love to John,” a dusky country ballad written from the perspective of a gay friend’s conservative mom. The story humanizes immigrant parents and revels in making progress toward better familial relationships—a rare subject in pop songs. But the incongruousness of its placement threatens to overshadow its touching message. The album’s only acoustic track swerves in just as Hold the Girl is about to close.
Like a classic overachiever, Sawayama wants to do so much in her music: The Cambridge graduate wants to speak to the political climate and flaunt her keen study of pop history. She wants to assuage the pain of others but also be carefree and fun. She wants to honor her own queer, Asian, first-generation British identity yet keep things relatable to a universal audience. What’s left is an album with an excess of initiative but not enough follow-through, a record that takes on so much it risks burning out. In the end, the little girl at the center of the album gets swallowed by her own vision.


Using inscrutable digital techniques—randomization, automation, perhaps a little black magic—the Bay Area artist makes bewitchingly skewed techno full of tangled loops and mismatched time signatures.

Searching

In the 14 years between his first and second solo albums, James Devane completely retooled both his sound and the methods he used to achive it. Where 2008’s s/t built up swirling drones from looped guitar, his 2022 follow-up, Beauty Is Useless paired dense, soupy synth strokes with techno’s taut rhythms. With the much swifter sequel Searching, it’s starting to look like Devane makes a habit of reinventing his approach on every release. Exactly how he made the music is unclear; the label vaguely notes hours of source material (presumably the artist’s own) run through custom software, and fashioned into tracks that play fast and loose with musical key, tempo, and rhythm. All that complexity appears to lie beneath an unusually simple interface: in Devane’s words, “a search button and a save button.”
When an artist hands the reins to software—hardly an unusual practice in 2024—it’s not always clear where the technology ends and human creativity begins. Yet similarities between Beauty Is Useless and Searching—which Devane frames as a companion piece to its predecessor—help locate the person within the process. On both records, a smoky, clandestine quality clings to the synths and murky rhythmic elements, recalling gloaming air that permeates the work of Kassem Mosse and other artists on Germany’s Workshop label.
If Beauty Is Useless was largely guided by an even-tempered 4/4 pulse, Searching jettisons that framework in favor of a much more disruptive listening experience. The more fully formed tracks have a meandering, structureless quality interrupted by abrupt endings and brief sketches —alarming 10-second blasts of noise that sound like the digital equivalent of scrubbing through recorded tape as quickly as possible. It’s a playful analogy that foregrounds Devane’s conceptual process, with its apparent emphasis on cycling through found sounds.
Even in the cyclical ambiguity of techno, a lack of formal structure can be risky, and Devane leans into the chaos. On Searching, crispy percussive sequences play against each other in mismatched time signatures, yielding a kind of mutant funk. Yet the forced looping of these contrary musical elements—especially noticeable on "One Place”—harness even the most disjointed rhythms into surprisingly fluid grooves. Aided by the woozy comfort of the machine-soul synth blooms, stubborn loops are seductive, in their own weird way, even without the comfort of a conventional toe-tapping pulse or journeying narrative.
The jarring effect of the rhythmic disturbances has its own charm, but the more stable moments on the record are easier to sink into. The mesmerizing melancholy of “No More No Less” recalls the yearning, misty-eyed quality of Actress’ breakthrough albums; similarities with Darren Cunningham’s off-center vision of techno abound in Devane’s crooked thump and low-res aliasing.
Devane’s slanted approach sits comfortably alongside other curious operators unbound by dancefloor expectations. Austin Cesear’s records from the early 2010s spring to mind, as do Kit Clayton’s charmingly skewed West Coast dub-techno variations from the decade before. In its heavy-lidded, dreamlike atmosphere you might draw a line to the nu-ambient scene around labels like 3XL and West Mineral Ltd., but that crew’s cavalier YouTube-flipping spirit feels distinct from Devane’s intentional, closed-loop practice.
What these reference points do share with Searching is an enduring warmth that transcends any odd angles. The tactile lope of electric piano at the center of “Last Strut,” the blown-out tape cascades on “Lights Down Low”—beneath the technology driving the record lies an inescapable emotional intelligence that no piece of software could ever replace.


Ten years after its release, legendary vocalist Jeff Buckley's only proper full-length is given the expanded treatment. Like the similar edition of The Clash's London Calling reviewed earlier this week, it's been extravagantly repackaged and appended with two additional discs-- one an audio disc collecting non-album tracks, the other a DVD documentary spotlighting the recordings sessions.

Grace: Legacy Edition

Jeff Buckley was a diva. And a particularly fanciful one at that. I remember reading about the late soprano Maria Callas and Buckley fave Edith Piaf, the fragility of their demeanors, and the notion they were more precious, tender than the world around them; that every moment within earshot of their voices was like hearing the song of the most rare and beautiful bird in the world. In fact, Piaf as the "Little Sparrow" was the most obvious blueprint for Buckley's flighty, unabashedly emotional expression; in both cases, whether your reaction was to adore or abhor the often raw (but never adolescent) bouts of melo- and other kinds of drama, no one could say they held their hearts in check. Consequently, they needed lots of maintenance. In Buckley's case, it was a steady stream of collaborators, girls, gigs and an impressive reserve of torch songs from way back when. He really wasn't built for the strand of rock music borne of rebellion or release; he was a songbird, like the kind that used to receive roses and blown kisses from the debutantes in the balcony after performances.
Unlike Callas and Piaf, Buckley grew up in an age when the chanteuse didn't need an orchestra or a symphony hall to get their message across. After having cut his musical teeth in Los Angeles, he came to New York in 1991 and soon hooked up with guitarist Gary Lucas, eventually joining his band Gods & Monsters. Lucas and Buckley established a partnership that produced some very good songs (including "Mojo Pin" and Grace's title track) in a very short time, but before they had a chance to make it out of the city, Buckley quit the band over a disagreement regarding his future loyalty. Afterwards, he played solo gigs, sometimes incorporating friend and bassist Mick Grondhal, and assisted by a growing legion of nighthawk fans, was soon signed by Columbia as a solo artist.
1993's Live at Sin-e EP gives the best idea of what Columbia's A&R; rep must have seen in Buckley at the time. At shows, he was the picture of a high diva: sprawling, boundless and with more than a pinch of self-conscious glitter. However, as he revealed in The Making of Grace, the behind-the-scenes feature that leads off the third disc DVD in Columbia's new "Legacy" edition reissue of his debut full-length, he needed a band. He already had Grondhal, met drummer Matt Johnson through Grace executive producer Steve Berkowitz, and, midway through recording the album, brought in guitarist Michael Tighe (who eventually contributed "So Real", to which Buckley added a chorus and put on the record in place of the bluesy "Forget Her"). Producer Andy Wallace speaks on the documentary about his concerns over how much of the record should reflect Buckley's solo performances, but true to form, the singer wanted it all.
Somehow, despite an overflow of ideas-- they needed three different band setups available at all times to accommodate Buckley's various moods-- the record got done. And it was released. And thousands of open-heart romantics heard their ship come in. As it happened, Grace was received with mixed feelings from critics who probably thought they were getting the next great alt-rock savior, and instead felt they'd received dinner theater for the moody crowd. They had a point: For all its swells of emotion and midnight dynamics, Grace was not a record to rally the post-grunge alternation. It made a jazz noise where a rock one was expected and a classical one where a pop one might have sold more records. MTV snagged "Last Goodbye", Grace's most radio-friendly song by a considerable margin, but Buckley was predestined for a cult stardom.
Grace's strengths have been well-documented over the years: The flawless choice of cover songs, including the definitive reading of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" (that we learn on the documentary was actually chosen based on John Cale's 1991 version from the Cohen tribute I'm Your Fan); the mystic, blue textures of "Mojo Pin", "So Real" and "Dream Brother" that seemed as related to Led Zeppelin as to Scott Walker as to Buckley's father; Wallace's sympathetic, intimate production and the band's equally sensitive following of Buckley's lead. And of course, he sang the hell out of those songs. His voice turned upward songs that naturally leaned inward; his reading of Nina Simone's "Lilac Wine" transformed from misty cocktail lament into transcendental experience, and the unlikely recasting of English composer Benjamin Britten's "Corpus Christi Carol" into ambient lullaby.
And, as this reissue proves, for every bit of lightning trapped in a jar, Buckley was willing to try his hand at many songs with which he held a weaker grasp. Firstly, he fancied himself a rock star, and the second disc of this set includes endearing, but ultimately inessential readings of the MC5's "Kick Out the Jams", a pretty silly Screamin' Jay Hawkins impersonation on Leiber & Stoller's "Alligator Wine", and a speed-metal take on "Eternal Life". His version of Big Star's "Kanga-Roo" nails its weary grandeur, but goes overboard on the ensuing 11-minute jam session, effectively transforming it from intimidating wall of drone into a meandering, albeit unfinished and tentative giant. He sounds best interpreting songs like Bukka White's "Parchman Farm Blues", Simone's "The Other Woman", and Bob Dylan's "Mama, You Been On My Mind", though his own take on the blues-- the previously unreleased "Forget Her"-- sounds comparatively pedestrian.
So, the question becomes how frustrated you are willing to be with Buckley. His posthumous releases suggest what Grace did: that he was one of the most talented musicians of his generation, while also being one of the most impulsive and, often, maddeningly inconsistent. Is he really being served by the uncovering of outtakes, B-sides and live performances? Fans certainly think so, but I won't cop to listening very beyond his lone completed record these days. And it bears emphasizing that its rewards have lost nothing in 10 years. Grace remains one of the most engaging, inspired records ever made, and its 10 original songs serve as the best possible portrait of Buckley as a diva, songwriter and artist.


After years spent trading on a bulletproof back catalog and eccentric persona, the Jamaican titan teams up with UK dub heavyweight Adrian Sherwood for a welcome return to form.

Rainford

Lee “Scratch” Perry is the living embodiment of the notion that history would, on the whole, prefer its musical heroes to stop making music. If Perry had packed it in toward the end of the 1970s, leaving his 1977 collaboration with the Clash on “Complete Control” as his parting gift, he would be enshrined in legend as the man who helped invent dub reggae, pioneered the idea of the studio as instrument, and recorded Bob Marley. And he is remembered for all that. But as Perry continued to pump out the tunes—he has more than 50 albums to his name since 1980—he gradually mutated into a cartoonish character best known for his Delphic proclamations and penchant for wearing mirrors. Fans today come to him for his classic recordings and eccentric persona, but not so much his recent catalog.
In this, Perry resembles a pre-American Recordings Johnny Cash, another artist whose continued output in the 1980s did little good for his reputation. And if Rainford, Perry’s new album, isn’t quite the Cash-esque late-period renaissance that producer Adrian Sherwood has compared it to, it is at least somewhere in the same ballpark, thanks to the album’s sympathetic contemporary production and personal appeal.
You can best hear this newfound clarity on album standout “Autobiography of the Upsetter.” While recent Perry tracks, like Orb collaboration “Ball of Fire,” could be a lot of fun, you’d be hard pressed to divine what his rambling vocal lines were actually about. On “Autobiography of the Upsetter,” Perry plays things relatively straight, narrating his life story from childhood in 1930s Jamaica to his burgeoning musical career, only occasionally veering into the kind of free-associative babble that litters his more recent work. Perry’s vocal may not be particularly melodic, but there is something profoundly moving about hearing a musical legend who often seems at odds with the modern world relate tales of Bob Marley and his mythical Black Ark studio in a tone of guttural gravitas, while backing vocals lilt around him in a tender embrace.
Rainford is helped along by the instinctive production of longtime Perry collaborator and British dub pioneer Adrian Sherwood, whose work here balances classic reggae tropes—off-beat guitar chops, cavernous bass lines, and one-drop drums—with modern production touches and idiosyncratic effects, doing much of the melodic lifting along the way. “Cricket on the Moon” combines classic reggae lurch with an occasional digital stutter; “Let It Rain” offsets a dancehall beat with a string section that is slurred yet elegant; and “Makumba Rock” introduces Brazilian instrumentation to a rolling bassline.
For all Sherwood’s musical nous, though, the strength of the album is in collaboration, with Perry’s iconic vocal tone—a mixture of phlegmy rasp, biblical command, and childish wonder—giving life to Sherwood’s lolloping grooves, much as Johnny Cash’s funereal baritone anchored Rick Rubin’s minimalist production on American Recordings. The brilliance of “African Starship” lies in the interplay between the song’s rusting metallic skank and Perry’s sky-gazing humanity, while Perry’s melodic vocal is not enough to rescue the rather drab production on “Run Evil Spirit,” a song that outstays its welcome two minutes in.
Rainford is unlikely to rejuvenate Lee “Scratch” Perry’s career in the way American Recordings did for Johnny Cash. The songwriting is too inconsistent, and there are too many moments of musical flab. It’s also possible that Perry hasn’t fallen quite as far in the popular imagination as Cash had; his groundbreaking early work casts a long shadow that his more unfocused later years have’t dimmed. But Rainford marks a welcome return for an artist who for far too long had been rendered all but invisible behind his abstruse wit, esoteric demeanor, and all those mirrors.