Tears for Fears’ second album is the one sound of pop-rock in the ’80s. Its personal psychology, meticulous compositions, and world-sized choruses evoked the loss of control in an overwhelming era.

Tears for Fears: Songs From the Big Chair

Songs From the Big Chair

Welcome to your life. From the moment you enter the world, you’re traumatized, first by your very birth, then by every subsequent moment of your existence, each of which will have a profound and significant effect on your behavior; in childhood, when you experience emotional distress, that pain remains, buried underneath time and memory.
In 1970, the psychologist Arthur Janov published The Primal Scream, in which he detailed his theory that the neuroses and baggage that adults carry with them are caused by repressed traumatic events from childhood. The same year, John Lennon and Yoko Ono underwent therapy sessions with Janov for about five months. Lennon channeled his experiences into his solo debut, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. He created one album out of his encounters with Janov; Tears for Fears based their entire career off of Janov’s work.
Even the band’s name is derived from The Primal Scream, on a theory of children’s nightmares. “Basically, if they are allowed to be themselves in their waking hours and are allowed to let their natural crying out, then they won’t dream up monsters at night to be scared of because they can’t face the reality of being scared of their parents,” bassist and co-singer Curt Smith told Will Hall, the author of Tears for Fears . . . Tales From the Big Chair. “Since emotional stress is the central issue here, the solution... is to encourage an emotional response so intense that the years of hidden anger and hurt are allowed to surface from the depths of the unconscious.”
On their second LP, 1985’s Songs From the Big Chair, Tears for Fears took a cue from Lennon and applied what they’d learned from Janov toward studies of single subjects: money, power, love, war, faith. But where Lennon went small, Tears for Fears went huge. They took the goth and synth-pop foundation they constructed on their debut, 1983’s The Hurting, and piled on saxophone, Fairlights, guitar solos, samplers, and live drums on top of drum machines. They wrote cresting choruses, arena-ready anthems, elegant ballads, and multi-section songs that have more in common with prog-rock than most of new wave. And they improbably created not just one of the biggest albums of the 1980s, but an album that manages to exude the 1980s in the same way that Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours conveys the lonely narcissism and hedonism of the ’70s, or Love’s Forever Changes captures both the bliss and the ominousness of the Summer of Love.
When Smith and Tears for Fears co-singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter Roland Orzabal went to record Songs From the Big Chair, the two possessed the kind of ambition necessary to produce an era-defining album. More than anything, Tears for Fears felt like they had something to prove to both critics and to themselves.
The Hurting went to number one on the UK album charts, sold a million copies, and yielded three top-five singles—“Mad World,” “Pale Shelter,” and “Change”—but the UK music press approached it with near hostility. In his review of the album for NME, Gavin Martin writes, “Sure, they may be popular—so was the Reverend Jim Jones when he took 5,000 followers to Guyana to commit mass suicide.” Orzabal told The Quietus, in an interview, “We weren’t particularly liked by some of the music journals. If you were on the front cover of Smash Hits, you were doomed.”
Part of the problem was that Tears for Fears came off as being too sincere—The Hurting was so explicit about its debt to Janov and The Primal Scream, and so lacking in subtlety, that the album cover depicted a child holding his head in his hands. But that sincerity belies the cosmetic gloss of the music. With its gleaming synthesizers, tight drum-machine programming, and minor-key melodies, The Hurting is a hallmark of early-80s dark wave and goth. That beauty came with a price: “It ended up taking a lot of time and costing a lot of money because we were fussy,” Smith told Hall. “The problem with it taking so long was that when we looked back at tracks we’d done months before we’d think, ‘Ooh, I don’t like that.’”
For Songs From the Big Chair, the band regrouped at their keyboardist Ian Stanley’s home studio in Somerset and rehired Chris Hughes, who also produced The Hurting. After a few false starts, Orzabal formed a brain trust of himself, Hughes, and Stanley, with Dave Bascombe providing engineering assistance and Smith signing off on ideas and making suggestions. They took inspiration from the music they were listening to, cerebral art-rock by Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt, and Peter Gabriel. Smith confessed that his favorite album at the time was the Blue Nile’s A Walk Across the Rooftops. He could tell the Blue Nile had total artistic control—the music sounded calculated, finessed, meticulous.
In the documentary Scenes From the Big Chair, Orzabal revealed that the method Tears for Fears adopted was “fitting songs into interesting sounds.” To create the sounds, the squad in Somerset set up a formidable assembly of equipment: “a LinnDrum II box, a Drumulator drum box, a Roland Super Jupiter synthesizer, a Fairlight synthesizer, a DX7 keyboard, a rack of guitars, a Steinberger Bass, a Fender Stratocaster and a Gretsch maple drum kit,” according to Hughes. The main foursome would go in the studio from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., five days a week. They started by experimenting with individual fragments and then building them out. They took their time and loosened up their approach. Most importantly, they enjoyed themselves.
No track on Songs From the Big Chair exemplifies this free-roaming, tessellating approach more than its opener, the No. 1 single “Shout.” As Hughes told RBMA, “[Roland] set up a little drum box and a little synthesizer with a bass tone. He pressed the button on the drum box, and he programmed this little beat and it had these little chimey bells and a clapping drum beat. He pressed one of the keys and started singing, ‘Shout. Shout. Let it all out.’”
The template was an opportunity for Hughes, Orzabal, and Stanley to indulge. The structure of “Shout” is minimal, just one or two vocal melodies played over a steady drumbeat for around six-and-a-half minutes. But the thrust of the song is repetition, because as the hook grows and grows, the band keeps adding patches and instruments that compound the potency of the songwriting: a Fairlight-programmed ghostly synth-flute line, chippy guitar licks, and then a perfectly timed breakdown at 2:40, with a warped keyboard patch followed by a huge rush of Hammond organ and then a return to that earlier synth-flute, in a sequence that sounds like a brass band bursting through, then all of it blanketed by heavy-feedback guitars and backup vocals, a knifelike guitar solo running on top, and Orzabal and Smith still singing: “Shout. Shout. Let it all out/These are the things I can do without.”
“Shout” sounds tough. The drumbeat has an industrial, boxy shape and texture that resembles a march, with Orzabal and Smith’s joint vocals delivered almost as a chant. The song is just as explicit about primal therapy as virtually any other Tears for Fears track that predates it. But it’s less egregious, even though the execution is more direct. From the outset, Tears for Fears sound like they have a real purpose. The end of the verse is a declaration: I’m talking to you.
Tears for Fears named Songs From the Big Chair after the 1976 TV movie Sybil, in which Sally Field plays the title character, a woman with multiple personality disorder who could only prevent herself from using her different guises as defense mechanisms when she was sitting in her analyst’s chair. But the title also smartly references the music—because the songs all pertain to different sides of Tears for Fears’ personality—and that the band are delivering the album from an assured psychological state.
Tears for Fears could harness their self-confidence for a variety of tones and subjects, something that’s evident on “Head Over Heels,” another one of Songs From the Big Chair’s major singles. Whereas “Shout” is brooding and martial, “Head Over Heels” is dreamy and skeptical, with its glimpses of the joys of relationship chitchat (“I wanted to be with you alone /And talk about the weather”) and its swooning chorus, clouded in the band’s heavy, misty production. The music contradicts the narrative, in which the protagonist sabotages courtship because of his own self-hatred (“I made a fire, I’m watching it burn/I thought of your future”) and doubts that he can ever truly be in love (“I’m lost in admiration, could I need you this much?”). At this point, Tears for Fears could address their own insecurities without appearing wimpy or self-absorbed.
Songs From the Big Chair’s two ballads, “I Believe” and “Listen,” also manage to avoid preciousness or campiness, impressive because they’re the two parts of the album that most expose Tears for Fears’ love of progressive art-rock. “I Believe,” a gentle track that sounds like it was recorded in a piano bar, greatly resembles Robert Wyatt’s quirky, curling songwriting. The band is forthright about Wyatt’s influence, as corroborated by their engrossing, bare-bones cover of the singer-songwriter’s “Sea Song,” the B-side to “I Believe.” On the symphonic, largely instrumental “Listen,” pockets of blobby keyboard and electric guitar course through the song, with a world-music chorus at the end that sounds like a mash-up of Gabriel’s Security and Jon Hassell and Eno’s Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics.
The first two verses of “Listen” also address the then-ongoing Cold War, and Songs From the Big Chair finds Tears for Fears engaging with politics more than ever before. On their first single, the propulsive “Mothers Talk,” the band juxtapose themes of motherhood with protests against nuclear war (“But when the weather starts to burn /Then you’ll know that you’re in trouble”), a canny insinuation that unresolved maternal issues lead to violence. On the simmering, nocturnal “The Working Hour,” Orzabal takes on the music business; its chorus, “This is the working hour/We are paid by those who learn by our mistakes,” straight-up calls out how record companies turn fun and creativity into manual labor and profit from it in the process.
Tears for Fears synthesize all of the threads on Songs From the Big Chair—intricacy, romance, psychology, and politics—on the album’s centerpiece, the everlasting “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Hughes says that he, Orzabal, and Stanley put the song together in a week, astonishing because the track has so many components: the twinkling synth at the beginning joined by a spider-like guitar, the snappy instrumental lead-up to the opening verse, the shuffling drum beat, the chorus, the galvanizing bridge, a moody instrumental passage, a guitar solo, a new melody for a verse afterwards, another guitar solo. And the genius of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is how it escalates, how each part increasingly amplifies the passion of the music.
More than any other Tears for Fears track, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” most successfully transposes Janov’s psychological texts into a pop song with global resonance. Though “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is obviously a meditation on power, you could project virtually every major issue of the 1980s onto the lyrics: the environment (“Turn your back on mother nature”), the fleeting nature of financial success (“Help me make the most of freedom and of pleasure/Nothing ever lasts forever”), authoritarian rule (“Even while we sleep/We will find you”), and the Cold War (“Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down”).
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is a song with a near-universal appeal, and likewise Songs From the Big Chair seemed to resonate with everyone—jocks, goths, pre-teens, adults. “At our gigs, you’ll get young girls at the front, the Joy Division fans at the back and even some hippies putting in an appearance,” Smith told Hall. “Our fan mail is certainly very varied, containing letters from everyone from twelve-year-old girls to mothers with five-year-old daughters.”
It took four years for Tears for Fears to follow up Songs From the Big Chair, and what came out of it was The Seeds of Love, an overambitious, elaborate, refined, and somewhat underrated album. Orzabal supposedly alienated everyone—Smith, Hughes, and Stanley—during its production, mostly due to his perfectionism. For a while, it seemed Tears for Fears had faded away, a relic of an era too gauche to respect anymore. The only place you might find them was on “Dennis Miller Live,” which used “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” as its opening theme.
Then, Tears for Fears turned up in an unlikely place: Donnie Darko, a film that subverts ’80s teen movies. “Head Over Heels” is memorably included during a slow-motion montage, but Tears for Fears were mostly rediscovered by younger audiences thanks to Michael Andrews and Gary Jules’ cover of “Mad World.” By peeling away all the circuitry and flash of the original, replacing the gizmos with mostly non-electronic instruments, and slowing the tempo, Andrews and Jules exposed “Mad World” as the post-9/11 emo ballad it was perhaps destined to be. As the 2000s progressed, you’d hear Tears for Fears incrementally more often. In 2008 Kanye West sampled the chorus of The Hurting’s “Memories Fade” on “Coldest Winter,” from 808s & Heartbreak, coincidentally about an artist trying to deal with the death of his mother.
Today you’ll hear “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” all over the place—it’s a staple of classic-rock radio, pharmacies, bars, and parties. But at its core the song is still dealing with Janov; with how, ultimately, what human beings want is control, and the inability to control your own life is misdirected into a desire to overpower other people. It’s a constant with Songs From the Big Chair: interior drama is construed as being about collective suffering. Personal chaos is universal. Welcome to your life. There’s no turning back.


Toned down but no less penitent, nostalgic but ready to stake a claim to a new future, the duo’s long-awaited full-length is one of the most indulgently sinister rap records of the year.

Roc Marciano / The Alchemist: The Elephant Man’s Bones

The Elephant Man’s Bones

Rumor has it that, in 1987, Michael Jackson made a bid to buy the skeleton of Englishman Joseph Merrick. Merrick, known as the Elephant Man due to his severe physical deformities, spent his life as an object of ridicule and medical fascination before passing away in 1890 at age 27. A tragic figure with a kind heart, he would become the subject of multiple books, stage plays, and movies across the next century, most famously director David Lynch’s 1980 biopic The Elephant Man. Jackson was reportedly moved by the film, finding solace in a scene where Merrick—portrayed by actor John Hurt—is chased by an angry mob through Liverpool Street station and cries out to his attackers: “I am not an elephant. I am not an animal. I am a human being! I…am…a…man!” Over time, Jackson became fascinated by Merrick’s life. He arranged to view his skeleton at Royal London Hospital, where he allegedly offered $500,000, and later $1 million, to purchase it for his collection. Jackson and his estate have denied this story, but the legend lingers.
Roc Marciano and The Alchemist share a fascination with the idea of putting a premium on what they deem to be high art. Both are rapper-producers, Marci from Long Island and Alchemist from Beverly Hills, and both were co-signed by hip-hop royalty early in their careers. Their paths weren’t exactly the same, though. Marci built his status from the ground up after his time in Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad and the group the U.N. came to a close, while Alchemist became a marquee name producing for everyone from 50 Cent and Kendrick Lamar to Boldy James and Armand Hammer. They turned their influence and underground grind into flourishing independent businesses catering directly to a clientele seeking nose-bone-shattering rap music. The Elephant Man’s Bones, the duo’s long-awaited full-length, mixes the grime they’re known for with sounds that flutter instead of seething: Imagine your favorite mob-affiliated uncle drunk at a family gathering, spinning funny, disgusting, and melancholy yarns to GoodFellas-style lounge jazz. Toned down but no less penitent, nostalgic but ready to stake a claim to a new future, it’s one of the most indulgently sinister rap records of the year.
By now Marci’s pimp-meets-capo persona is so well-established that he can afford to spend his time burrowing deeper to see how much gold he can unearth. He’s a specialist in the sense of Pusha T or Kool G Rap—his deadpan commitment to bending his schtick around different sounds is half the fun. “Me and my Uzi, we lookin’ like a couple spoonin’,” he says on opening track “Rubber Hand Grip,” the comedy and intimacy of the image never overshadowing the danger of being shot by a man who claims he “made God in my likeness.”
His reference pool brings a stark clarity to his mythmaking, giving bits of humor and pathos more depth. On “Quantum Leap,” he claims to own a Bentley that comes with his own personal version of rapper and actor Fonzworth Bentley. Names and brands slip through Marci’s stories unexpectedly, like the Champion clothing he mentions wearing back in the day on “Trillion Cut,” or two bars from the title track that nod to Billie Holiday and the sitcom Good Times to flesh out his come-up: “God bless the child y’all, I finally got it together/From good times hanging in the chow line like Florida Evans.” Elephant Man’s Bones is bursting with quotables, but more impressive is how Marci’s stories weave in seamlessly with the icons he namedrops. He writes about his triumphs and struggles like all of history was waiting for him to appear.
With few exceptions, Marci’s solo albums are known for being entirely self-produced, flooded with gossamer sampled loops and anchored by drums that range from tinny to nonexistent. Alchemist handles every song here, approaching each with an ominous elegance. Aside from the 8-bit synth blasts of “Daddy Kane,” most of Elephant Man’s Bones is dominated by keys—pianos, organs, harpsichord—and drums, teasing out a lounge-jazz vibe he rarely indulges.
Previous one-off Marci and Alchemist collaborations were busier and more boisterous. Both 2016’s “All for It” and 2018’s “In Case You Forgot,” team-ups that appeared through Alchemist’s Craft Singles series, leaned into standard, bludgeoning boom-bap drum programming. Elephant Man’s Bones is more like a shadowy extension of the sunlit warble of “Harry O.,” from 2019’s Yacht Rock 2—relaxed and confident, with a Ruger in the champagne bucket just in case. “Rubber Hand Grip” turns the psychedelia of Alchemist’s work on Armand Hammer’s Haram inside out, its chimes and drums throbbing like an irregular heartbeat. “Quantum Leap” and “Liquid Coke” are two of the prettiest and most stripped-back beats he’s ever created. The crisp vocal loops on songs like “JJ Flash” and the title track float past tiptoeing drums to hover alongside Marci’s voice. Alchemist’s beats are relaxed and full-bodied, creating a calming atmosphere that Marci stuffs with allusions to Call of Duty and gangsters catching bullets with their teeth. For the duo to finally meet in the middle for a full-length project after all these years—and for that project to be as warm, gutter, and satisfying as The Elephant Man’s Bones—is remarkable. When two rap veterans show out with this much style and skill, it’s easy for them to name their price.


Radiohead’s favorite cellist steps out of their shadow on an album composed largely of beat-oriented electronic music influenced by—but not excessively reverent toward—the work of Aphex Twin.

Shelley’s on Zenn-La

A cello makes a pretty good hiding place. It’s got a wide body and a dusky tone that doesn’t stick out when paired with other instruments. And until now, that’s kind of what British cellist Oliver Coates has been doing: hiding in plain sight, obscured by the shadows of more famous names. He played on Jonny Greenwood’s scores for The Master and Phantom Thread, and made crucial contributions to Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool. (“That’s it—that is the sound of the record,” Coates has recalled Thom Yorke saying after hearing him lay down parts for the album.) He also contributed to the strings scraping ghoulishly across Mica Levi’s Under the Skin score.
Coates’ growing catalog of solo and collaborative work includes a CD-R with Leo Abrahams from 2012. His solo debut, 2013’s Towards the Blessed Islands, gathered covers of Iannis Xenakis, Squarepusher, and Roy Harper—a surprising list, reimagined in often surprising ways. His best-known album is probably his and Levi’s Remain Calm, from 2016—a questing study for cello and electronics that went to the heart of his interests in sound and structure. But an easily overlooked 12" from 2014 captured his style in a very different way. On “Another Fantasy,” Coates rebuilt a loopy, sample-heavy house track from producer Bryce Hackford from the ground up, using only his cello. Hackford’s original sounded like “Around the World”-era Daft Punk heard through the wrong end of a Detroit storm drain, but Coates’ strings felt raw and resinous, emitting cricket-legged shrieks and bassy rattles. It couldn’t have been simpler, but its collision of club aesthetics and classical tradition contained multitudes.
Like his 2016 album Upstepping, Shelley’s on Zenn-La focuses largely on beat-oriented electronic music, featuring an unlikely—and at times unstable—mixture of cello, synthesizers, drum machine, and effects. Much of the record was made in Renoise, a fairly unglamorous software sequencer. As it did on his “Another Fantasy” rework, the cello serves as the secret glue holding Shelley’s together, even when you can’t necessarily recognize it. In some places, it takes the form of a buzzing drone; elsewhere, it’s a pizzicato funk line or a keening synth pad or even a scratchy hi-hat noise. Very rarely does Coates’ instrument sound like itself.
“Cello Renoise” is one exception: The bowed figures, bold fifths and fourths, saw steadily against stumbling, rickety drum-machine programming—an unusual configuration that sounds a little like something Arthur Russell might have done had he lived to see the heyday of IDM.
If any influence looms large over Shelley’s, however, it’s that of Aphex Twin. His style of drum programming is all over Coates’ album, in which scratchy, lo-fi machine sounds thud and twitch and tangle themselves up in knots, seemingly loath to follow a straight line for more than a beat or two. You can also catch echoes of Aphex Twin in the album’s slippery approach to pitch; temperamental synths slide in and out of tune, sounding drunken and giddy.
But unlike a lot of music made in Aphex Twin’s wake, Shelley’s never sounds overly reverent. On the contrary, it is playful and exploratory—the rare example of “experimental” music where pleasure seems to be at least as crucial as process. The interplay between contrasting textures—scrappy drum samples, brass-synth squelch, ethereal wordless vocals—is a source of constant fascination. Track lengths range from 95 seconds to nearly nine minutes, and in every case, the duration feels natural, a factor of Coates discovering exactly what he wants to say and then moving on. “Lime” is a sparkling miniature for sour-tuned chords (apparently cello, although it’s treated to resemble an analog synth) and crusty TR-707 that could pass for a very lo-fi cassette dub of an early Boards of Canada demo. Both “Charlev” and “Perfect Apple With Silver Mark,” on the other hand, wend their way across shifting landscapes of shuddering drums and sneakily melodic synth/cello progressions, with expositions, breakdowns, codas, and climaxes rolling endlessly by like the views from the window of an alpine train.
Unlike a lot of beat-based music, the focus here isn’t primarily on the precision of Coates’ patterns; Shelley’s is more about the way they scatter and change shape, like clouds drifting overhead. In the entrancing “Norrin Radd Dreaming” (featuring a musician named Malibu, who had a song on last year’s outstanding Mono No Aware compilation), that means synths and voices that come in waves, sloshing to and fro, building to an ecstatic peak that you never quite see coming. However Coates made this stuff—he’s described employing effects chains he designed for live performance, in which his cello is run through a dizzying array of “delays, phasers, bit crushers, pitch shifters, reverbs”—it seems clear that happy accident played an important role. There’s a kind of alchemy at work here, and you can sense Coates’ delight when what comes out of the black box doesn’t sound anything like the signal that he fed into it.
That said, the album’s most affecting song, “Prairie”—almost unspeakably beautiful, the kind of thing you might request to have played at your funeral or on your deathbed—strips away everything but delay and reverb, marking a return to the cello-ness of the cello. If the rest of the album is about seeing how thoroughly Coates’ instrument can be transmogrified into other sounds, this one is about finding comfort in its wood and metal, its graceful lines, its embrace of the room’s acoustics. You can hide behind a cello, and you can hide the cello inside other sounds. But here, Coates finds a way of being present that no other instrument can imitate.


Harlem rapper Smoke DZA keeps it real on Not For Sale, doubling down on classic hip-hop as he’s got an allergy to trends. That’s mostly a good thing.

Not for Sale

Harlem rapper Smoke DZA’s Not for Sale is a memorandum for culture vultures, those outsiders who, in his mind, are trying to pollute rap, and those industry insiders trying to sap its swagger for their own personal gain. DZA is a classicist, and he derides those in the game selling out, all while listing off the things money can’t buy them—the love, smoothness, the culture, the cool. If 2016’s Don’t Smoke Rock with Bronx legend and rap super-producer Pete Rock was DZA’s taking a stand in deed, aligning himself with a cultural icon, then this is him writing new bylaws. These are DZA’s 12 rap commandments, in which he extols the mid-grade hustler.
DZA’s rap philosophy is to always err on the side of caution. This can make him a bit of a conservative music-maker, but it also makes him relatively dependable. He presents a lifestyle of subtle comfort and his verses are capo proverbs rapped through kush clouds. He presents himself as rap’s Most Interesting Man, saying things like, “Heavy is the head that wears the crown; imagine how my wrist feel.” He isn’t that interesting, and his writing can underservice his workmanlike flow, but his raps are always appealingly aspirational. He’s the hood everyman turned Super Fly. “Smoking on Cheeba, sipping on Chevas/I’m in the old school, center of Portland like Arvydas/Them niggas tryna style, I’m like beat it/It’s Bob Marley on my chain, not Jesus,” he raps on “The High.” He has largely remained consistent, if not stagnant, since 2010’s George Kush Da Button, occupying the same realm of scotches, cigars, indica blends, and Raf Simons Adidas.
Not for Sale stays true to DZA’s formula but opens the aperture just a bit wider. He doesn’t have the most distinct perspective, so he compensates by building his persona. On “The Love,” his better half is presented as a reflection of himself; her taste enhancing his, which is, in a clever way, another proposed demonstration of his discerning nature. “Connoisseur, mature, Dior type of fly/Comador cigars, Macallan with no ice/No gettin’ sauce, endorse a ratchet TV night/Laugh, experience life, we too young to be angry and hype/We ain’t perfect but our future is bright/And even imperfection is perfection in sight,” he raps.
Despite his confidence, DZA isn’t exactly introducing novel sounds or ideas on Not for Sale, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be fun to hear him navigate New York City with fresh eyes. Half the charm of this record is simply how comfortable DZA seems, even as he fights off rap profiteers and extortionists. He’s never been (and won’t ever be) a rapper par excellence, and that’s kind of the point: He’s settled into his own underdog niche. DZA positions himself as a dark horse, the unassuming alternative to outright primacy, and his nonchalance makes it that much more endearing.
DZA’s constant commitment to cool is upholstered by his ear for luxurious beats. “The High” samples Erykah Badu “Didn’t Cha Know,” in a flip that sounds eerily like J. Cole’s “Too Deep for the Intro,” but the bass is far more warped, and his flows tumble directly into the knock of the drum as a disembodied Badu wails from within. “The Mood” invokes Scarface’s “Guess Who’s Back,” repurposing the same intro from the Originals’ shimmering “Sunrise,” as DZA and Joey Bada$$ take turns repping their boroughs. From the decompressed doo-wop of “The Legacy” to the Boi-1da-lite of “The Game” and “The Antidote,” scanning boom bap and trap drums, Smoke DZA always manages to find his sweet spot.
In a rap age of larger-than-life excess, where even the most basic rappers are Leo DiCaprio playing Jordan Belfort, an image that lends itself to surreality, Smoke DZA’s boasts are accessible, manageable even. He doesn’t want things to look too easy because they weren’t—he likes to show his work—or too exaggerated because it can cheapen that labor. There aren’t any Teslas racing through these raps; he’s got an unlimited line of credit at… Ikea. In this vein, “The Hustle” is a DZA manifesto of sorts, where he reaffirms his dedication to the cash grab that is capitalism and chastises those unwilling to work for theirs. Money is his primary motivator, but he’s nearly as driven to defend rap from those who would misuse it.


Claire Cronin’s latest record connects her lifelong love of horror movies to her simple, creaky songs.

Big Dread Moon

In 2017, the singer-songwriter Claire Cronin published an essay called “Blue Light on the Screen: Notes on Horror.” Writing about her lifelong attraction to ghost stories and slasher flicks, the Athens, Georgia-based artist explored the comforts of the genre—being able to predict what will happen next, who the killer might be, when to expect a resolution. In one section, she lists her favorite movie taglines, disembodied from their titles so that they read like poetry (“They’re here,” “They won’t stay dead,” “Before you die, you see:”). In another, she makes you feel genuinely sad for all the franchises that ended prematurely and ambiguously: death without resurrection. “Perhaps more than any other genre,” she writes, “horror demonstrates the pleasure of repetition.”
It’s a quality that horror shares with folk music, and Cronin’s fascination with one has aided her mastery in the other. Big Dread Moon, her latest album, is full of scenes you’ll recognize from any number of Halloween classics. There are werewolves and ghosts, guns and knives, fangs and blood, ominous weather and dolls in gowns. Cronin has a cracked, cawing delivery like Will Oldham or Scout Niblett—artists who could turn from conversational to spectral with the quietest gesture. Her music is alluringly sparse; most of the arrangements feature only her guitar and Ezra Buchla’s viola, with occasional synth and percussion for texture.
Like her nonfiction writing, Cronin’s lyrics are kaleidoscopic. She writes from the center of the action, wandering through the dark; we’re likely to see the danger lurking before she does. In “What the Night Is Thinking,” she sings in the third-person to justify this instinct: “We want wild winds,” she sings. “We want bones bleached and scattering.” She often does the job herself, writing songs that swirl like tornadoes through quiet streets. “Tourniquet” is a blues song bled dry; “Like a Shield” surges like a ’90s alternative rock hit stripped to its bleakest form. Stretches of silence in horror films generally forecast just how violent things are about to get. Cronin’s songwriting is heavy with pre-traumatic calm.
The simplicity of her music grounds its intensity. Many singers could take a line like “Coffins long for the touch of death” and have it sound vaguely creepy, but Cronin has a gift for confiding it like something she has experienced first-hand. This balance between tenderness and terror, the supernatural and the quotidian, is crucial to her work. Movie screens appear in multiple songs, while “Call Out” finds her surprised by the way blood looks in real-life—brighter than she expected. The album’s peak is “Wolfman,” a slow, menacing ballad sung with the devotion of a love song. Her words are vague enough to sound like a nightmare but specific enough so that you can see the lamplight, hear the rain on the streets. It’s the kind of whispered story that’s usually laughed off early in a film, only to become frighteningly real by the end. When she sings, you believe every word.


Commemorating 20 years of his Prurient alias, Dominick Fernow’s sprawling, three-hour foray into “doom electronics” feels like a swing of the pendulum back to the noise project’s Rust Belt roots.

Rainbow Mirror

Dominick Fernow is not here to make things easy for you. In recent years, the noise trailblazer and Hospital Productions founder has drifted toward respectability, with his military-themed techno project Vatican Shadow taking him out of grimy basements and installing him in superclub DJ booths around the world. Fernow was once characterized as a noise bro, but his work is seldom satisfying in a beer-chugging, rock ’n’ roll way, and often can be deliberately taxing—either actively painful (see the sustained feedback screech of Prurient’s 2008 album Arrowhead) or flirting with monotony, as the negative and depressive energies that course through the project are converted into sound.
Rainbow Mirror is not designed to be easily digestible. Released in honor of the Prurient project’s 20th anniversary, this collection clocks in at over three hours in length, spreading out to four CDs or—phew—seven slabs of vinyl. It’s consciously forged in testament to the project’s seldom-documented early days in rural Milwaukee, a period which is memorialized at length in the liner notes, alongside a piece of original fiction written by Fernow and Scott Bryan Wilson. Way back when, Prurient was a trio, and for Rainbow Mirror, it is again. Recording live, Fernow is accompanied by a pair of Hospital Productions regulars, Matt Folden of Dual Action and Jim Mroz of Lussuria, and the resultant sounds have been mixed after the fact by dark-techno magnate Shifted. The music is in a style Fernow calls “doom electronics,” which forsakes Prurient’s familiar blend of feedback pyrotechnics, surging synths, and shrieked vocals in favor of long, sluggish canvases of sound that grind like rusty machinery, or ooze and seep like hot tar; think a 21st-century update of the Eraserhead score, or the exquisite, entropic improvisations of Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report, and you’re on the right track.
It’s hard not to be impressed by Rainbow Mirror’s sheer scale. Put it on, go downstairs, bake a cake, mow the lawn, come back, and it’s still going, a swirling void of sound that simmers with morbid unease. The three-man lineup ensures that for all this music’s live, improvisatory provenance, these tracks crackle with textural detail. “Walking on Dehydrated Coral” is a miasma of watery blips and foul synth drool. “Chaos -
Sex” intersperses moments of rumbling ambience with passages that sound like a band saw cutting metal, while the foggy drones and muted percussion of “Path Is Short” might be industrial music for a post-industrial age, where automated processes are pushed to the edge of collapse. Occasionally, moments of unexpected prettiness emerge from the wreckage—see, for instance, the naïve, three-note synth melody that surfaces from the droning turbulence of “Falling in the Water,” though here it is left to revolve ceaselessly until its beauty withers on the vine.
Fernow started the decade with a spree of glossy, rhythmic records like 2011’s Bermuda Drain and 2013’s Through the Window that reflected a burgeoning fascination with dance music, refracting noise and power electronics through techno techniques. Rainbow Mirror feels like a swing of the pendulum back to a more freeform, primitive spirit, away from the urban centers of New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin and back toward the Rust Belt that spawned him. For all its imposing scale, though, it lacks some of the dramatic finesse of classic Prurient. Fernow’s poetic lyrics, spoken or shrieked, have been a key hallmark of the project, and without them, these abstracted noisescapes lack the narrative character of his best work. But Prurient also remains defined by its sense of constant evolution, and by burrowing back to its earliest beginnings, Rainbow Mirror feels like a new arc in the Prurient story. Where next remains to be seen.


The fourth full-length from Lana Del Rey is sincere and sublime, pushing her fascination with pop culture iconography even further while adding a newly personal touch.

Lust for Life

We were instantly entranced when Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games” surfaced six summers ago—candid but aloof, artfully homemade, haunted in tone with a video that felt like a message in a bottle washed ashore for reasons yet unknown. Del Rey didn’t give easy answers, but we still asked all the wrong questions in return, demanding clearer demarcation between the woman born Elizabeth Grant, the character known as Del Rey, and the millennial-outreach focus groups we presumed to have masterminded the whole thing. It’s a drag to rehash the Born to Die discourse now—a conversation so tediously narrow over a body of work that would prove, over the next five years, to be thrillingly rich.
Since the drastically superior Paradise Edition reissue of Born to Die, Del Rey has neither swayed nor settled. Instead, doubling down on her palette of inky blues and blacks, the singer-songwriter has delivered a trio of dark, dense, radio-agnostic albums that stand wholly apart from any of her pop music peers. If there’s anything about Del Rey that’s obvious by now, it’s that she means it—all of it. Every word, every sigh, every violin swell, the Whitman quotes and JFK fantasies and soft ice cream.
Still, even for the converted, it’s almost too easy to trip into the endless black holes of Del Rey’s universe, where Hollywood sits at the very center in glamorous ruin. Her songs overflow with the iconography of America at its most mythic: purple mountains’ majesty, rockets’ red gleaming, Monroe, Manson. Her layers on layers of symbolism can be disorienting, as I imagine Del Rey intends them to be, encouraging endless cross-references and deep-dive readings of her work that seek to apply some grand cinematic theory to it all—and perhaps there is. But her fourth full-length, Lust for Life, suggests that at its best and truest, Del Rey’s music is sublimely simple: one voice, one story, one meaning. For years, it seemed Del Rey’s artistry lay in her ability to offer herself as a concept pursued to its logical end. Lust for Life presents her as something more interesting: a great American storyteller.
Two things immediately set Lust for Life apart from the rest of Del Rey’s catalog. First, that smile, beaming from the belladonna of sadness, posed in front of the same truck from the Born to Die artwork. Even stranger: the tracklist is packed with features for the first time since we’ve known her. This would be Del Rey’s “happy album,” fans predicted—or worse, an obligatory pivot into wokeness. As it turns out, Lust for Life isn’t outright happy or overtly political (and thank god for that), though Del Rey is re-examining her relationship with Americana. “I’m not going to have the American flag waving while I’m singing ’Born to Die,’” she said recently, of her current tour visuals. “I’d rather have static.” Beyond a symbolic “Pardon Our Dust” sign for a nation in turmoil, it’s an apt representation of the moment Lust for Life captures—a record of transition, documenting not so much the result of a profound change in worldview as the process of change itself.
Perhaps the most significant departure here is evident from Lust for Life’s first song, “Love”—a warm, grainy, ’50s-rock anthem (and by far the album’s best single) in which Del Rey shifts focus from her own internal struggle to address her audience directly. “Look at you kids, you know you’re the coolest,” she sings reassuringly, relinquishing her role as the protagonist. The effect is that of a slow pan, the frame creeping outward from Del Rey and stretching gently towards the horizon. That impulse towards a communal understanding of her universe appears most obviously in songs like “God Bless America - And All the Beautiful Women in It” and “When the World Was At War We Kept Dancing,” two pared-down folk ballads with souped-up low ends (the former includes instrumentation by Metro Boomin, with errant gunfire punctuating the chorus).
These are titles that may have once implied a campy wink but now appear entirely sincere—songs for figuring out exactly where the fuck we are now. And more than any specific predecessor within the folk canon, they remind me—as does much of Lust for Life—of the paintings of Edward Hopper, a realist who captured a new American landscape, as figurative as it was physical. Hopper painted isolated, voyeuristic scenes of the anxiety and ennui of an increasingly urbanized nation set against the totems of Americana (diners, motels, highway gas stations). His work buzzed with the tension between tradition and progress, the cold power of the new against the sublimity of the natural world. Like Hopper, Del Rey’s realism functions doubly as impressionism—literal representation as a means to capture the feeling of life in America.
There are moments on Lust for Life that, while less successful on a pure songwriting level than some of Del Rey’s more focused work, are fascinating distillations of what a Lana Del Rey song means. On “Coachella - Woodstock In My Mind,” a song built to withstand the expected eye-rolls, Del Rey soaks in a Father John Misty festival performance, taking stock of the sea of flower crowns in the crowd as she draws lines from the moment out towards the past and future. It’s the most meta song in her catalog—a sweet and self-aware acknowledgment of the entire Lana Del Rey thing—and that’s before the chorus breaks into an impossibly graceful nod to “Stairway to Heaven.” And if the first verse of Sean Lennon duet “Tomorrow Never Came”—with its references to Bob Dylan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elton John—felt like an oversaturation of her symbol-heavy lexicon, Del Rey reinvents “doing the most” anew on the bridge: “Isn’t life crazy, I said, now that I’m singing with Sean?” It is at once hilarious and flooring, and I can picture no other artist but Del Rey being able to pull it off.
But the best parts of Lust for Life are simpler—songs that succeed not to the extent to which they concentrate the Lana Del Rey mythos, that present her songwriting as poetry that can stand on its own. There is “Cherry,” a cavernous torch song that reminds you Del Rey’s always been more Cat Power than pop star, rumbling with paranoid sub bass and waterlogged echoes of trap drums—the least obvious and most effective allusion to Del Rey’s connection with the way rap production sounds now (though Playboi Carti serving as the long-lost Shangri-La back-up ad-libber on “Summer Bummer” is an inspired touch). Her lyricism has reached a new level of sophistication, switching from devastatingly plainspoken (”Real love is like feeling no fear/When you’re standing in the face of danger/’Cause you just want it so much”) to the more abstract and sensual. There are visions of black beaches, burning roses, summer wine, and peaches, inexplicably ruined; it all feels like a Vanitas for contemporary America—a still life of soft decay. And on “13 Beaches,” a Hollywood film score that stutters and thuds into narcotic rap drums and ’90s alternative angst, Del Rey merges her symbolism and literalism into something like zen poetry: “It took 13 beaches/To find one empty/But finally it’s mine.” It’s at once a document of lived experience (escaping the paparazzi across a string of beaches last summer) and a meditation on the sublime—the symbol of the thing embedded in the thing itself.
And though Lust for Life’s lengthy midsection could benefit from further editing, Del Rey saves the album’s two most stunning and thematically essential songs for last. “Change,” recorded the night before the album was due, consists of nothing more than Del Rey and a piano, contrary to her penchant for wall-of-sound epics. “There’s something in the wind, I can feel it blowing in,” she sings in a pointedly small voice, leaving rhyme schemes behind. “It’s coming in softly, on the wings of a bomb.” It’s a record sung from inside the curl of a cresting wave—the feeling of something happening, around you and inside you before you’ve figured out exactly what it means. And on “Get Free,” Del Rey delivers, at last, the album’s mission statement: “Finally, I’m crossing the threshold/From the ordinary world/To the reveal of my heart.” It is not so much a revelation as a promise that one is coming, and when she sings plainly, “This is my commitment,” the album cover’s uncharacteristic smile reveals itself not as a declaration of happiness, but a reminder that it’s still worth believing in.


Emily Haines leads her band into their seventh album with their own sound, immune to trends and the zeitgeist, full of big, broad rock anthems.

Art of Doubt

Metric is a juggernaut, as Canadian an institution as Tim Hortons or stories about raccoons. They’re their own distributor—all their albums since Fantasies have come out on their own label, Metric Music International—and their own sound, immune to trends or the zeitgeist. Their latest album may be called Art of Doubt, but the only thing in doubt from album to album is proportions: synthetic to acoustic, crunch to shimmer, angst to release. Opener “Dark Saturday” says it outright: “I change by staying the same.”
The point of that lyric, of course, is that staying the same can be good, and Metric, in particular, thrive on a kind of comfort-food familiarity. They’re the kind of band where a single song can be a litmus test for the whole discography and aesthetic: if you like this, you’ll probably like everything they release at some gut level. On Synthetica, it was the searing “Youth Without Youth.” Here, it’s “Love You Back,” with Emily Haines’ vocals, precise and crystalline, pressed against Jimmy Shaw’s guitar and its high-gloss tone. (Change can be found elsewhere; like the other members of Broken Social Scene, Haines experiments in her side projects, like her band the Soft Skeletons’ excellent Choir of the Mind.)
Unlike 2015’s Pagans in Vegas, where the band went fully synthpop at a time when seemingly 75% of the music world population was doing the same, Art of Doubt is decidedly rock: guitar and bass loud in the mix, first riffs in the first seconds. The “Reptilia” lope of “Risk,” the “Every Breath You Take” chug of “Holding Out”—all are familiar, all work. Some credit here goes to new producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen: Not only is he a longtime fan of the group, but his résumé is like the best possible version of Metric’s peers on both sides of the genre straddle. Vital rock acts like Wolf Alice and Paramore, towering synth acts like M83 and the late School of Seven Bells—they, and Metric, have one thing in common: an affinity for albums that sound enormous.
Metric do succumb to one trend, namely the streaming-era impulse to make albums about 18 minutes longer than they need to be. And like many long-running institutions, Metric occasionally feel called to address The Problems of Today. While their past albums have plenty of quasi-political lyrical tweaks, the world is quite a different thing in 2018 than 2015—or 2003, the year their debut Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? came out, a year to which Shaw compared the current political landscape. There are so many bands with so many grievances, so any prospective new protest song needs more protest than, to quote the implied subject of them all, “There’s something going on, and it’s bad.” But on “Die Happy” she simply asks, “So what is this society?” “Holding Out” mentions “scroll[ing] through pictures” but it is no more novel.
Even if those moments land flat, Art of Doubt serves up it’s best songs around it. “Seven Rules,” from the Choir of the Mind sessions and heard last year as “Come On, Angel,” has a gentle, Nina Persson-like lope (and what I swear is a Kate Bush reference). “Now or Never Now” is big and knows it, luxuriates in it, spooling out six minutes of anthem. And the title track is the best thing Metric’s done since Synthetica and specifically Haines’ best vocal performances: It goes from seething to shouting to a clipped, defiant staccato to sighing high register “We gotta take it upon ourselves the next time the kick drum starts,” she sings. It’s an old sentiment about music, but for a couple minutes, it’s possible to believe.


The Water From Your Eyes vocalist’s new solo EP is a collection of charming, heartfelt bedroom pop songs that deserve to be more fully realized.

Thanks for Coming: What Is My Capacity to Love? EP

What Is My Capacity to Love? EP

Rachel Brown keeps their foot on the gas pedal. In addition to making experimental art-rock as one half of Water From Your Eyes, the 26-year-old singer-songwriter has uploaded over 80 solo releases to Bandcamp as Thanks for Coming, even releasing this year’s self-deprecatingly titled highlight compilation You Haven’t Missed Much to help newcomers navigate their sprawling catalog. For them, churning out tracks keeps their creative muscles active and frees them from overthinking. But their latest EP, What Is My Capacity to Love?, shows how speed can be a disservice too, with candid self-reflections on romance that can feel undercooked.
Brown’s Water From Your Eyes bandmate Nate Amos mastered every song on the EP, but What Is My Capacity to Love? is a far cry from the cacophony of their band. The lone similarity is a discordant guitar line running through “Melted,” which could be one of the rubbery riffs on Everyone’s Crushed. Instead, Brown prefers barren, lo-fi bedroom pop where errors only add to the music’s charm. On “Try Again,” they tumble off beat while rushing through the central refrain, as if to mirror being mentally distracted by crush. “Depends” is thrust forward by emotional, almost lackadaisical strumming that recalls the tender twee of the Softies; Brown confesses to the dangers of loving someone too hard, the spare instrumentation magnifying their vulnerable delivery.
Brown’s mesmerizing, almost detached singing anchors the music of both Water From Your Eyes and Thanks for Coming. It can be deceptively dynamic, and on What Is My Capacity to Love?, they try on different vocal styles: fluttering falsettos, glossy whispers, irritated talk-speak. While it’s thrilling to hear Brown play around with their delivery, sometimes their words feel cheap. As they reminisce on a past relationship in the EP opener, they lean on eyeroll-worthy punchlines: “I wish I’d captured you like a photograph/I wish I had/But still life is still life.” Their petulant enunciations on “Postcard”—“I broke my heart then I blamed him, framed him for the crime”—further underscore the juvenile writing.
What Is My Capacity to Love? is like a heartfelt mixtape that slipped through the metal divider of your high school locker. Maybe it’s because of the voice note that closes the album, which is spoken directly into the microphone like some last-ditch confessional: “I can’t see anything that I don’t like about you—but you will,” Brown says at the end of “Spotless Mind,” resignation weighing down their voice. “You know you will think of things, and I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me. Okay? Okay.” The pent-up feelings emanating from that final passage are intense—and it’s this intensity that helps elevate “Spotless Mind” from more humdrum bedroom pop. If only What Is My Capacity to Love? could maintain that heart-piercing tension throughout. The homespun quality of Thanks for Coming songs draws them close to the chest, but the music deserves a more striking, realized form too.


After a year flooding the internet, this Michigan rapper collects 15 of his colorful and brutal raps, which split the difference between deadpan and dead serious.

City on My Back

Rio Da Yung OG raps like a teacher who has gathered all their students on the rug for storytime. It just so happens that the Flint, Michigan-based 25-year-old’s tales all concern drug dealing, drug addiction, and paranoia. He raps over anxious, piano-driven production similar to Detroit hip-hop, chronicling his past with reflective anecdotes that may or may not be lies: the time when his uncle took away his football as a kid and told him to sell drugs instead; when he ran into the guy who stole his bike back in elementary school, so he shot him in the leg; when his uncle was sentenced to life in jail, but received clemency from Barack Obama.
Last year, Rio Da Yung OG’s hectic punchline-based rap found the ears of longtime Detroit staple Peezy. Before Peezy left to serve a jail sentence, he took Rio under his wing. Rio switched his focus from running around the streets of Flint to music, but he had legal troubles of his own, and soon, drug charges landed him on house arrest. The isolation turned into a blessing, allowing him to flood the internet with his chaotic and line-crossing take on the Detroit sound for the second half of 2019.
His bedroom recordings were so colorful and brutal that the only reasonable response was to laugh at the absurdity: “Meet the plug, take everything while his son watching/Swear to God I ain’t stick that nigga up my gun robbed him,” he raps on “Legendary,” his biggest song to date. Filming his music videos on the same front lawn and rooms throughout his home, he became one of the premier street rappers in the Midwest in months.
Rio keeps this momentum with City on My Back, 15 songs of straight shit-talking over funky beats that could have been made in any year since 2008. The appeal of Rio is simply in listening to him talk. Every line is detailed, as if pulled from a script: “Don’t say shit when I cook dope, I think the kitchen wired,” he says on the 50 Cent-sampling “Window Shopper.” He gives us a peek into his daily life on “Listen To Me”: “It’s nine in the morning I just woke up/Before I make an egg sandwich, I cook dope up.” His raps can go from dark comedy to bleak in one line: “Scared to close my eyes, I might die, I drunk a lot of syrup,” he says on “2020 Freestyle.”
Even Rio’s missteps are never flatout failures. “City on My Back” is one of Rio’s first attempts at a hook, and it’s weak for sure, but his verse more than makes up for it: “Just a sold zip, he say it smell fresh that’s cause it really soap/Yeah, I’m a dirty person,” he cracks. Here are the instructions to “Dance Moves,” Rio’s attempt at crafting a viral dance challenge: “Look man, get on the ground, hump the floor, act like you fucking a bitch.”
But Rio doesn’t need hooks or dance challenges. Listening to him rap on City on My Back is like being engrossed in an audiobook on a long drive. Whether he’s playing a dice game in Louis Vuitton, pouring a girl a cup of E&J and telling her that it’s Henneessy, or selling a customer fake pills, few can tell a story better than Rio.


Classic rock-loving blues-rock duo follow the warm Rubber Factory-- and make its Nonesuch bow-- with this more austere collection.

Magic Potion

The Black Keys were never meant to be classy. For one, they're from Akron, a city that's not quite East Coast or Midwestern and has vaguely smelled like burning tires every time I've driven through it. For another, they're playing blues-rock in 2006-- no irony, no kind of pretense to authority or being some new band of purists, just a blues-rock band. But even if their so-called "raw" panache had been recycled a few times over, they had the kind of songs ("10 a.m. Automatic" chief among them) that demanded the car windows be cranked down and the volume knob twisted firmly to the right for anyone weaned on classic rock radio.
Now signed to elegant major-label imprint Nonesuch, their set up remains the same: one guitar and a set of drums. Singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach plays these unadorned riffs like the guitar was a harp, like their blues pillaging was a stately and noble pursuit, and these familiar riffs should be admired in and of themselves like museum pieces. I didn't expect to hear a 13-piece orchestra on Magic Potion, but nor did I expect to hear such a dry, austere record after the warmth of Rubber Factory. They whip up everything they can between just the two of them, Auerbach and drummer Pat Carney, but what they work up this time isn't a sweat-- it's restraint. On Magic Potion, the pleasures are coyer and the variations much more subtle from riff to riff, song to song. In other words, it's not the record I want to hear from the Black Keys.
There are few attempts to push the two-man band into newer territory, but those that do aren't necessarily welcome. "Strange Desire" is a worked-up staccato paean, leaning on cymbal tapping and heavy reverb like a "No Pigeons"-style aggrandizing retort to the Kills' "The Good Ones", but squelches any of its novelty by rhyming "fire" with "desire." At the end of each verse. There are three verses. "You're the One" fares better, a slow honey drip of gorgeousness with some much-needed vocal doubling to further sweeten the deal, but it's not half as palatable as, say, "The Lengths" from Rubber Factory.
There's very little spark to early sequenced numbers "Your Touch" or the "Heartbreaker" retread "Just a Little Heat", but the latter half of the album does slow down and start to smolder. The title track makes the most of its space as Carney pounds in all the right places, showing restraint without losing the track's pulse. "The Flame" is a molten slow jam, as is "Goodbye Babylon", a stop-start stutter that stretches its quiet tension over a tricky chorus riff that would be awkward in the hands of any other band. But as Magic Potion shows, it's difficult to sustain an entire album of that almost-but-not-quite letting loose (and being a two-instrument band obviously doesn't help).
I'm not willing to rehash the argument over whether they have the right to play their sparse, occasionally unpredictable take on blues-- one of the most tired arguments there is-- because I couldn't care less whether they jacked their swagger from Muddy Waters, Led Zeppelin, or even White Stripes. They used to be a good time. They used to have songs. Magic Potion is a record where overwhelming competence meets measured restraint, but for me, sacrilege trumps sincerity, and I'd rather hear tuneful blasphemy than a tasteful snoozer of an album. Shit, give me Blueshammer any day.


The Melbourne quintet’s second album strolls through familiar territory with good guitar work and good songwriting that never quite peaks where it used to.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Sideways to New Italy

Sideways to New Italy

Rolling Blackout Coastal Fever is a combo whose three-guitar attack is hot—steadily but not dangerously so—super-intense, and super-catchy. After a pair of 2017 EPs and their 2018 debut Hope Downs, the Australian quintet has steadily lost interest in tracks with characters and situations: the bric-a-brac of sharp lyric writing that goes down well with the band’s relentless forward, backward, and sideways motion. Sideways to New Italy does little to change this suspicion. These 10 tracks refine RBCF’s formidable strafing abilities. They roll. They’re feverish. They also coast.
Devoted not to narrative so much as six-string calisthenics, RBCF are a treat when they play from within one of the aural dust clouds they’ve stirred. On “Cameo,” Fran Keaney lays out a romantic scenario of uncommon banality (“Your voice had an old melody/Like sweet river water,” egads) whose drama gets goosed by Tom Russo and Joe White’s cross-talking electric licks. Or at the three-minute mark in “Cars in Space” when Keaney, Russo, and White pick away at discrete parts: ripple effects that rattle its foundations for the sake of testing them. And on “Sunglasses at the Wedding,” Keaney moves his fingers as if each acoustic strum births a new color trail.
RBCF get in trouble, however, when they want us to pay attention to words and such. This is more of a problem on the material sung by White, responsible for the this-is-pop moments that require a slight deceleration. White settles for phonetic placeholders on “She’s There” and lets the tug of Joe Russo’s excellent bass work and an impressive series of sparkling licks  carry him through “The Only One.” If the Acme facelessness of those titles gives you pause, consider: Hope Downs alone sported “An Air-Conditioned Man” and “Cappuccino City”; 2017’s “The French Press” isn’t even about the best way to prepare coffee—it’s one of the sharpest songs about sibling tensions in recent memory. But here’s the thing: RBCF are the guys you would’ve called to write that song.
If great bands create the terms under which listeners will accept them—in effect teach listeners how to listen to them—then good bands fold their hands on their desks as listeners review their antecedents. With the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On” as ur-text, RBCF careen into the Feelies’ chordal cul-de-sacs, emulate the scrappiness of the Clean, and even soak in the bubbly freshness of forgotten early-’90s college radio favorites like the Ocean Blue. Until Sideways to New Italy, their marvelous racket distracted from their derivativeness; now, only this good band’s racket will do.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The French outfit Alcest has been slowly turning away from the corrosive, ambient metal of their early work—a sound that’s influenced many, most notably Deafheaven—toward an unbroken dreamscape of cushiony shoegaze. Their fourth album, Shelter, produced by Birgir Jón Birgisson and featuring vocals from Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, marks that clean break.

Shelter

Like Opeth’s Heritage or Darkthrone’s The Cult is Alive, Alcest’s Shelter is the sound of a band that has undergone a decisive yet inevitable metamorphosis. In all these cases, extreme metal was the chrysalis or catalyst; what emerged wasn’t the same as what came before. Opeth shed death metal for bucolic prog; Darkthrone bent black metal toward d-beat crust. Neither came as a total surprise, and neither does Shelter. Alcest have been slowly turning away from the corrosive, ambient metal of their early work—a sound that’s influenced many, most notably Deafheaven—toward an unbroken dreamscape of cushiony shoegaze. Shelter marks that clean break. The French outfit’s fourth full-length is a statement of soft-spoken apostasy that’s unflinching in its resolve. And somewhat less than stellar in its execution.
The friction between ethereality and aggression is what made Alcest’s prior albums, and in particular 2010’s Écailles de Lune, so gripping. Quiet, chiming guitars meshed with thunderous riffs, and liquid-nitrogen synths bled into a bath of warm, soft vocals. Neige, the driving force behind Alcest, has allowed that friction to dissipate. What’s left feels wrung-out. Shelter’s eight songs are among the prettiest Neige has ever composed, with the happy-sad chords and bell-like hook of “Opale” bearing an unmistakable to resemblance to Chapterhouse’s “Breather”. But even Chapterhouse, among the wispiest of shoegaze groups, put more propulsion and surprise into their songs. Throughout Shelter that delicacy never lets up. Some tracks, like “La Nuit Marche Avec Moi” and “Voix Sereines”, muster enough determination to step on a distortion pedal. Beyond that, every element—from Neige’s whispery melodies to the shimmering sameness of the guitar—sticks unswervingly to the path of least resistance.
Shelter leaves no room for the questioning of its shoegaze credentials. Slowdive’s Neil Halstead is brought aboard to sing the lead vocals on “Away”, yet the shoegaze founding father sounds more deflated than dreamy as he moans through the song’s vaguely chamber-folk arrangement. Something is supposed to be evoked here: bemused melancholy, maybe, or wistful longing, or pensive detachment. Whatever it is, it never coheres or connects. At least it’s a break in the fog, even if it only offers a slightly bluer hue of featureless prettiness. The album was recorded in Iceland at Sigur Rós’ studio, Sundlaugin, with Sigur Rós producer Birgir Jón Birgisson, but it doesn’t sound appreciably different than Alcest’s previous output—let alone allow for much internal variation.
The 10-minute closer “Délivrance” nearly reaches escape velocity, a listless spiral of gossamer pop with brief bursts of distorted lucidity. It too collapses under its own lack of weight. Neige has stated in the past that Alcest is a project devoted to realizing in song his visions of otherworldly fantasy and wonder. In chasing that devotion, the songs themselves have been cast adrift. Still capable of great feats of mood and beauty, Alcest have transformed themselves, although not always in the best way. They’ve gone from being a remarkably innovative, influential, and singular force in a subgenre they helped create to being just another shoegaze act. That doesn’t make Shelter a bad album. As an aural analgesic, it goes down smooth and numbs what it needs to. But instead of tearing open the passageway between this world and whatever lies beyond, it shrinks that portal to the size of a keyhole.


Alex Giannascoli reached audiences beyond Bandcamp for the first time last year with DSU, a mostly upbeat collection of bedroom-spun indie rock that showcased a 21-year-old Philadelphian with a knack for songcraft and a tinkerer's curiosity. On his Domino debut, he gets darker and weirder than ever.

Beach Music

Alex Giannascoli reached audiences beyond Bandcamp for the first time last year with DSU, a mostly upbeat collection of bedroom-spun indie rock that showcased a 21-year-old Philadelphian with a knack for songcraft and a tinkerer's curiosity. Under the moniker of Alex G, he has made seven full lengths, most of which he put out himself. Beach Music is his Domino debut and, as he is poised to reach an even larger audience, he lets his weirder and darker instincts run rampant.
Giannascoli opens the curtains on Beach Music with a restless experiment that sounds like a cruddy bootleg of Aphex Twin trying to make beats for Scratch Acid. Distant yelling, electronic beats and lo-fi guitars all meet in a track that's less than a minute and sets the ground rules that this will not be Alex G's big, accessible breakthrough. He segues into "Bug", a traditional indie rock recipe of acoustic strums and stereo-panned electric guitars sprinkled with harmonics. The song is moody and intriguing, and just when you think it might be a good playlist candidate for a road trip with your parents, he warps his voice into Chipmunk territory on the line "bug in the crosshair".
Alex G has often used pitch-shifting, but he deploys it more than ever on Beach Music. "Brite Boy" sends his voice up a few notches to play a girl whose affection the title character will spurn and whose help he will reject, while "Station" brings his voice down so he can embody a homeless man breaking into a liquor store.  And "Salt" features both high and low voices, like tribes of ogres and elves uniting in song.
These moments bring to mind the similar voice trickery of Ween, who formed just about 50 miles north of Havertown, Pennsylvania, where Giannascoli grew up. The difference between the two lies in their motivation: Ween used the trick for comic effect, but Alex G doesn’t seem like he’s goofing around. Ween wrote in the liner notes for The Pod that they were huffing Scotchgard while recording—though they've since said they were bluffing—but Alex G makes no narcotic admissions whatsoever.  Regardless if the composition process involved new chemicals or not, it's clear that a lot of nefarious characters are lurking in these songs. Giannascoli's style has been compared to Elliott Smith in the past, and that's often been true of his presentation, but on Beach Music, it's as if the characters from Smith's darker songs have wandered over to Giannascoli's world, and they're a lot worse for wear.
Most of the songs have one-word titles and the lyrics are both vague and evocative. These traits come together best in the haunting and sweet "Mud". For this track, Giannascoli reaches beyond the pitch-shifter and gets an actual additional human being, Emily Yacina, to harmonize with him. When the pair repetitively whisper-sing, "I know something you don't know," your mind leaps to the worst conclusions of what this "something" could be, as nauseous keys creep into the arrangement and overtake the sounds of fingers skating up and down the frets of an acoustic guitar.
Some of the songs also feature the slightly atonal jangle that Pavement eventually claimed as their sound when they became a full band. What is remarkable about Beach Music is that some of these arrangements beg for you to dismiss them, the way you might have the very first time you heard Pavement, but what at first feels sloppy and clogged is actually intricate upon closer inspection. Complicated arrangements and gorgeous melodies reveal themselves  to you as rewards for your patience. Over time, even the alien voices begin to sound natural, even inviting.


Two years after her debut EP, MNDR's Amanda Warner returns with a Marina Abramović-referencing electro-pop LP she's called an attempt to "[challenge] money, wealth, power and the class system."

Feed Me Diamonds

It's neither Amanda Warner's fault nor entirely ignorable that she's surrounded by so many peers. Warner, who's performed for years with producer Peter Wade under the moniker MNDR, makes buzzy synthpop amid a deafening buzz of likeminded bands, and from any point in her career, it's a short step to two or three rough analogues or influences. After a couple of years jobbing behind the scenes for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and others, Warner's break came in 2010 when she lent a careening hook and Francophone snappiness to "Bang Bang Bang" by Mark Ronson, an act arguably better known for his antecedents (the vague, remembered 1960s), protégées, and followers than his actual music. This proves apt. The EP that caught Ronson's notice, E.P.E., strutted and shouted and revived all the 80s synthpop fit to get print. It commanded both attention and an inevitable clutter of comparisons: La Roux, Santigold, Goldfrapp.
The namedrops were predictable, but not entirely unwarranted. Warner's said she turned down various unnamed honchos with Katy Perry designs, though she didn't mind tossing tracks about with Patrik Berger, who co-wrote Robyn's "Dancing on My Own", and in the past few years she's built up a small battalion of collaborators eager to emulate that track. E.P.E. and its follow-ups are primarily Warner and Wade's work, but it's hard not to hear their influences. "I go my own way…/ This is my anthem," Warner sang on lead single "I Go Away" over meticulously rippling percussion and sumptuous synths; her way, by all indications, was stylish and fully formed, but perhaps a little too timely.
Two years later, Warner's debut LP arrives in much the same manner. She bursts off the cover of Feed Me Diamonds amid neon and chrome shrapnel; it's arresting, but it's pastiche. The music inside is much the same: 12 mostly solid electro-pop tracks that are immediate, immaculate, and suited equally to outlets populist-- "U.B.C.L." appeared in Jersey Shore in a prior rewrite-- and outré. The album's custom-built, in other words, to the synthpop template of the past few years. Some tracks veer house, others electroclash, others toward an 80s slow dance. Strewn through the mix are percussion stutters and pinball noises, and dubstep touches you could actually call tasteful. "Burning Hearts" begins with hoover synths, guitar bluster, and slivered vocal samples, like the Sleigh Bells/Purity Ring hybrid that legions undoubtedly asked for; it's even got spider imagery that could have crawled off the latter's debut. "Waiting" rides either a "Tainted Love" groove or whatever's left of it after three decades of further tainting. Albums like these have a few things in common. They're generally likeable. They almost always sound fantastic. At their worst, they substitute sheen for swagger and noise for punch; at their best, they have all four.
At her best, MNDR does. Single "#1 in Heaven", inspired by kidnapped then corrupted robber-heiress Patty Hearst, gleams like a bumper sticker; it turns her post-arrest taunts into a killer hook ("Tell them I'm smiling/ Send my greetings") and her bank stickup into instructions for the dance floor ("put your hands above your head…."). Warner's similarly occupied on loopy club anthem "U.B.C.L.", a rework of EPE's leadoff track, skewed only as much as its title. It's half as clever as it thinks it is, but probably twice as functional. "Sparrow Voices" is bracing, Warner and a sequencer trying to outfeint one another, though it's probably advisable to ignore anything it's trying to say about the cracks in China's economy.
That's the sort of topicality MNDR ascribes to almost every track. She's called the album an attempt to "[challenge] money, wealth, power and the class system," an admirable goal for a different occasion. It's not that dance-pop can't be subverted, but Hearst repurposed as a dancing queen is roughly par here. "Fall in Love With the Enemy" doesn't get much deeper than saying it isn't a choice. "Blue Jean Youth" is a list of nostalgia checkpoints that aims for iconic but lands somewhere around clip art. These are missteps, though, and few. "Faster Horses", named for an apocryphal Henry Ford quote ("if I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses") is noisy and addled-- the vague vocal patois on "the front ro-ow... you don't kno-ow” has too many similarities to mention-- but as a commentary on the genre's demand for ever-catchier material, it works.
Feed Me Diamonds is best, though, when it gets emotionally heady. At first "Stay" sounds too chilly, too insistent on delivering pat soundbites like "I'm not going to fade away," but the way the chorus trails off and the catch in Warner's voice when she sings "aching" betrays the act. The title track, meanwhile, is all catches. It's got its footnotes-- the reference this time is a quote by performance artist Marina Abramović about how her father was killed after being fed fine-pureed diamonds-- but you don't need to consult them to hear the masochism in Warner's voice as she meanders from the first crafted couplet ("lie with me, lie to me") on through reduction and dismantlement metaphors. MNDR always had style; here, at least, the substance has caught up.


The imaginative IDM producer behind 2006's awesome Body Riddle adds his own voice to the mix and increases the clatter, to mixed results.

Totems Flare

Think about the basic properties of beat-oriented electronic music. It emphasizes dynamic action, feelings of speed, impressions of light-- extremes and intricacies of sensation. It tweaks your senses with creative deformations of time and space, with strictly engineered frameworks lurking beneath sleek or gaudy facades. And as Simon Reynolds credibly argued in Energy Flash/Generation Ecstasy, it strives to create experiences instead of describing them. Doesn't it sound a lot like the state fair, and make it seem crazy that tinny speakers still blast mostly rock, rap, and country hits across the rides? Imagine Lindstrøm's slopes and plunges on your roller coaster; the Field's nested spins on the Tilt-A-Whirl.
In an obscure corner of the midway, Chris Clark mans the funhouse. He lays out certain conditions-- dark twisty passageways, treacherous stairs, and moving platforms-- but doesn't suggest that you experience them in any particular way. His songs are divided into bizarre chambers of clashing design. He's the rare case where a heavy-handedly metaphorical approach like this seems defensible. In interviews, Clark holds forth at length on process and ideas while neatly sidestepping taxonomical points. He has his go-to tricks: His specialty is the cataclysmic anthem, cobbled together from homemade break beats, glitchy jags of Euro- and acid-house, pockets of concussive noise, honeycombed synth lines, and contoured masses of distortion, all piled up in lunging heaps of coarse texture. He really doesn't seem to make any type of music, which means that there's no background proposition or guideline, and metaphor might be the only way to talk about it. As in the funhouse, you have to make your own way through.
We enter an unspoken contract with the funhouse: To be tripped, mocked, and have our skirts looked up in a spirit of good-natured mischief. It's the same with Clark, and at his best, he honors it. His greatest record, 2006's exquisitely convulsed Body Riddle, was full of spaces as deeply habitable as they were impossible. It was an alchemist's album-- violent where it naturally should have been tranquil (and vice-versa); corporeal where it should have been cerebral (ditto). The acid squelches of "Herzog" were weirdly serene and grounding, their ambient atmosphere charged with live-wire menace. It was, unquestionably, his most humane album. But the same body Clark celebrated in 2006 was trampled under the war-tank treads of last year's Turning Dragon, a fascinating but dyspeptic album that it's difficult to imagine anyone wanting to listen to very often.
As on Turning Dragon, Clark's tricks are all in place on Totems Flare, but the abstracts that made Body Riddle great are spottily present. It lacks a certain tenderness or reticence, and there's no implication of a compact with the listener, an assurance that this inhospitable space is ultimately for their pleasure. Put it this way: You would probably decline to ride a roller coaster designed by the Clark of this album, not trusting that its promise of danger wouldn't be taken to its logical conclusion, the car separating from the tracks. Totems Flare regains a measure of hospitality from its predecessor, but it brings only one new idea to the table-- Clark's singing, which is only partially effective. It works pretty well when he pitches his deep, roughshod voice toward dilapidated grandeur: "Growls Garden" imagines Matthew Dear's Asa Breed as interpreted by Thomas Brinkmann. But his cyber-Teutonic turn on "Rainbow Voodoo" is a bit silly.
Clark's voice works best when he uses it like just another sound source; say, as a stuttering, FX-laden pulse in "Look Into the Heart Now". Your attention is drawn to details like this because the compositions often feel under-imagined as songs. The aforementioned tracks make the first half of the album feel jumbled and cluttered. The fizzy syncopation of opener "Outside Plume" is enticing, but its lumbering synths and beat-dropping tangents thwart its momentum. Things do start coming together after the utilitarian vamp "Luxman Furs": "Totem Crackerjack" uses gusts of noise to enhance, not derail, its cadence, and has a confidently measured stride that carries it intelligibly from breakneck drums to delicate arpeggios. The home stretch has a satisfying continuity-- the revved-up but beatific "Future Daniel" runs into the rewinding ambiance of "Primary Balloon Landing"; the dark drive of "Talis" and "Suns of Temper" dissolves into the gentle guitar whorls of closer "Absence". That's how funhouses are supposed to work-- we know the chaos is an illusion, designed for our enjoyment by an orderly hand. Otherwise, they're just confusing and enervating.


Veteran rapper breaks from Mannie Fresh and grows up quickly, displaying a flexible flow and more layered lyrics.

Tha Carter II

Something great happened last week on The Tonight Show, poor Leno notwithstanding. Camera on musical guest Lil' Wayne, bassist behind him on pasty octaves, some keyboard "funk" preset, really thin till the guitars flange in. This is Alan-born Robin Thicke's "Oh Shooter" they're playing, straight-up, and Thicke, on stage beside Wayne, begins his stick'd-up anthem, his breath caught as it would be near chrome. Tune in then and you'd think Thicke was the star and Weezy just his cough-n-pepper hypeman. "I brought my homeboy with me," says standing Wayne of singing Thicke. He's kidding, right? Technically this is Wayne's song called "Shooter", but the entire "song", down to the track length, is Thicke's original.
What a tense performance so far; music played, but you could probably hear a pin drop. This young New Orleans rapper bouncing around on stage with Real Musicians but not much else, good for a laugh or a breakdance or whatever Other-approved televised woop-de-doo-- "cute" and "rap's not so bad after all" but also "rapping is easy," "rap=only good as the sample it swiped". Wayne was holding us at bay, all our presuppositions about his career, his music, his age and color, his responsibility qua artist post-Katrina. If Thicke's the crybaby here, Wayne's the stick-up kid.
"They want me with my hands up," sings Thicke, doing that stupid "raise the roof" thing. Wayne breaks: "I'm trying to tell you what I am, baby-- listen." And after almost two minutes of no talking he bursts the song open: "So many doubt cos I come from the South, but when I open my mouth the best come out. It's my turn and I'm starting right here today." And so on-- it's one of those black-and-white-to-technicolor moments after which, if you still don't believe in Wayne, you're just lying to yourself.
Granted, Leno won't make "Shooter" Wayne's "song" (it will be though), and we definitely can't call Tha Carter II his coming-of-age album or something equally corny-- people blew that line on the one before. Fact is, Wayne's still young, and he loves that he can get away with shit-- literally. Firmly keeping a foot in the sandbox, Wayne dabbles scatological throughout ("Dear Mr. Toilet/ I'm the shit"), sometimes even elaborately so ("You niggas small bubbles, I burp you/ I'll spit you out and have your girls slurp you"). Total energy thing, his verses still lack polish and a good edit (e.g. so many goddamn shark jokes), and his skits and "personality raps" (cf. "Grown Man") spell him out too bluntly, too vainly. And yet, there's "Shooter", or "Receipt", or "Get Over": "Standin' on stage in front of thousands/ Don't amount to me not having my father." Lines like this fall outta nowhere, jaw-droppers aplenty-- but "don't forget the baby".
People who met Wayne on "Go DJ" and thought him a lunchroom hack emcee-- who knows what's happened since then, but damn has he learned how to write. His squeak is now a croak, his laugh a little more burly, his flow remarkably flexible. Sometimes he's deliberate like syrup cats ("But this is Southern, face it/ If we too simple then yall don't get the basics") but when he needs to be, he's nimble as that Other Carter: "I ain't talking too fast you just listening too slow." Remy and weed, fast things and women, the corner-- these are Wayne's wax since B.G.'ing with B.G., putting piff on the campus before he ever enrolled in college.
What's different, and crucial: no Mannie Fresh electro-dixie beats. Free from Fresh, Wayne is less a novelty-- less Pinocchio on Pleasure Island (cf. 500 Degreez), less that dorm-room poster of the baby giving the middle finger. In fact, no-name nawlins producers run the boards, their crackly soul sampling and that implied return-to-rap roots a perfect complement to Weezy's raspy, sometimes even Miles Davisian voice. On "Receipt", which lifts the Isleys' "Lay-Away", Wayne's nursery rhyme delivery grants pick-ups like "my daughter want another/ Sister or brother/ And you looking like a mother" that rare smooth-crude game, something a young Curtis Jackson wanted out of "Best Friend" but didn't quite get.
"I'm a self-made millionaire, fuck the public," he says on "Money On My Mind." To an extent, he's right. This is Wayne's show, the album's only guests being Kurupt and Birdman and some r&b; b-girls. Not to say he's ungrateful; it's just that establishing his autonomy, his don't give a fuck, is infinitely more important. Lead track "Tha Mobb" really lays the audience/methodology/goals stuff on thick: For five minutes, no chorus, sad piano, he does it for "the gangstas and the bitches, the hustlers and the hos." Crossover? "Whatever." Mainstream? "No!" He refuses to be a Big artist, precisely so he can be a big Artist.
Shirking responsibility then? Katrina happened after most these tracks were cut, so let's not be assholes. He worked in a few rhymes after the fact, very simple stuff like "gotta get the hood back after Katrina" on "Feel Me". But the line that follows is more telling: "Weezy F. Baby, the 'F' is for 'FEMA'." FEMA, that lark, and so goes his point: For relief, he's not responsible. While Wayne hasn't made Tha Carter II a "Katrina album" in the obvious respect (cf. that horrendous "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" song rock critics like because they "get" it), he's given New Orleans something much greater-- someone, one of their own, to believe in. "If I talk it I walk it like Herschel," he says on "Mo Fire", his syllables out his mouth like smoke rings-- he means sex, other things too.


Veteran shapeshifters' 10th album is focused and concise, bearing the pop-golden touch of producers Paul Epworth and Bjorn Yttling.

Beautiful Future

At the turn of 90s, Primal Scream were one of the first groups to transform themselves from a conventional rock band into a production team. Breaking down traditional instrumental roles, the band became studio silly putty, collaborating with any number of producers. It's a concept that's since been embraced by the likes of Radiohead and the Flaming Lips, but where those groups have taken a studious, science-lab approach to their experimentalism, Primal Scream still project a venerable image of rock'n'roll hedonism. They unapologetically celebrate (and occasionally decry) their chemical consumption in song, mouth off in the press about crap bands and evil politicians, and load up their videos with Kate Moss cameos. Taken as a whole, Primal Scream's scattershot, trend-spotting discography doesn't so much represent a search for new sounds as a search for the best drugs: ecstasy (1991's epochal acid-house address Screamadelica), weed (1997's dubtronic odyssey Vanishing Point), speed (2000's explosive XTRMNTR), coke (2002's totally wired Evil Heat), and whatever horrific substance deludes them into releasing a Rolling Stones knockoff every 12 years (1994's Give Out But Don't Give Up, 2006's Riot City Blues).
Beautiful Future is an especially rich title coming from a band with such a sloppy past, but its concise, laser-focussed 10-song tracklist-- bearing the pop-golden touch of producers Paul Epworth (Bloc Party, the Rapture) and Bjorn Yttling (Peter Bjorn and John, Lykke Li)-- suggests Primal Scream's latest high is sobriety. The opening title track features the most joyous, clear-headed melody they've sung since Screamadelica's "Movin' on Up", but in a much different dressing. Here, their Exile-era Stones influence yields to the cheeky glam of Sparks, from the jaunty piano riff, hand claps and ascending chorus, to Bobby Gillespie's wry commentary on middle-class privilege: "Congratulations/ You're living the dream/ In the dead heart of the control machine." The lyric may read like a typically agitated Gillespie spiel, but since assuming the role of techno-punk provocateurs on XTRMNTR-- in retrospect, a prescient anti-Bush/Blair manifesto-- Primal Scream's music has turned less pointedly political; rather than wage a carpet-bomb attack on governmental institutions, Beautiful Future seeks to serve those who live under their rule, seeming more sympathetic to the notion of materialism as escapism.
Military references are either deployed playfully (the "gas chambers" on "Beautiful Future" standing in for a culture choking on over-consumption) or lazily ("Suicide Bomb" being a cheap, ripped-from-the-headlines metaphor for goin' crazy), but even in the latter instance, the self-immolating image is followed by Gillespie declaring, "I see the beauty in everything." So it's fitting that Beautiful Future, musically, is drawn to the allure of cool, shimmering surfaces: "Can't Go Back" retrofits the brutalizing guitar holocaust of XTRMNTR's "Accelerator" as slick, Korg-crazed new wave, while the "Billie Jean" beat and Italo-disco sheen of "Uptown" glosses over its working-class-heroic chorus, positioning the band as unlikely but eager elder statesmen to the nu-romantic electro of Sam Sparro and Calvin Harris.
In a sense, Beautiful Future finds Primal Scream turning into the sort of bright, bouncy 80s pop band they initially stood in opposition to. And yet, the transition is pulled off with such guileless enthusiasm and steely precision that the mid-album drift back to ultraviolet stoner/psych dirge ("Suicide Bomb", "Beautiful Summer") feels like an unnecessary regression better left to the likes of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. But the group also stumbles when they force the fun: The woeful "Zombie Man" repurposes several Screamadelica signifiers, but squanders them all on a stupid, sore-thumb chorus chant ("Hey hey zombie man/ Gonna put you in a can").
Fortunately, the record's weak center stretch is redeemed by a great closing trifecta that again finds Primal Scream putting their far-reaching Rolodex to use: CSS' Lovefoxxx trades cool come-ons with Gillespie on the evil-heated "I Love to Hurt (You Love to Be Hurt)", which sounds like the Plastic Ono Band rager "I Found Out" given an Ed Banger remix; an elegiac, Linda Thompson-assisted cover of the Fleetwood Mac Tusk track "Over and Over" effectively fills Primal Scream's one-soul-ballad-per-album quota; and though Josh Homme doesn't actually sing on the closing "Necro Hex Blues", his presence is made obvious by the song's relentless, motorik-metal pulse, giving the band's long-standing Stooges fetish a 21st-century makeover. Much like Screamadelica's acid-rock/acid-house crossover nearly 20 years ago, Beautiful Future proposes an equally unlikely union between Primal Scream's traditional leather-jacketed indie/Britpop base and today's neon-capped, bottle-serviced club kids. And if this attempted reconciliation produces moments of both elation and frustration, well, the band's erratic track record gives us no real reason to expect otherwise.


The tenth album from Daniel Lopatin is his most collaborative and accessible solo project to date, yet still full of unexpected chaos and songs that can suddenly dissolve and disarm.

Age Of

In children’s movies, the world is always ending. These worlds are smaller than our own, less complex and less fraught, but there is rarely an instance when they’re not in crisis. The kingdom is freezing over, or the human race has been doomed, or God is getting ready to go off to college. When they come out of crisis, the worlds are fundamentally changed—kids’ movies don’t adhere to the trope of the action hero batting away disaster and everything going back to normal. They are one of the few mainstream cultural arenas where vivid eschatologies can play out unburdened by the need to massage the status quo. So it follows that, on his most apocalyptic record, Oneohtrix Point Never would sneak in a song meant to soundtrack a hypothetical Pixar movie.
Age Of, the tenth studio album from the electronic artist Daniel Lopatin, spills over many of the formal and conceptual boundaries set by previous OPN records. After working with Anohni on her debut solo album Hopelessness, Lopatin found himself drawn to the process of collaborating with other artists, a stark contrast to the cerebral solo labor that had driven his work to date. Instead of going it alone again, Lopatin looped in James Blake to co-produce and mix the album. Anohni and noise artist Dominick Fernow (aka Prurient) lent vocals to several tracks, while Eli Keszler supplied live drums and multi-instrumentalist Kelsey Lu played keyboards. Strikingly, Lopatin sings lead on four songs, threading his distorted voice through jagged electronics for the first time since 2010’s Returnal.
The inclusion of more pop-friendly artists and the foregrounding of the human voice might suggest that Age Of ranks among OPN’s more accessible pieces. If anything, it’s one of his most challenging. Sound objects drift in and out of focus like space debris from a forgotten explosion; slick, retrofuturistic synthesizers commingle with harsh noise; the record’s most conventional song, “Babylon,” ends abruptly, like someone unplugged it. The songs on Age Of are chaotic. They do not behave the way you expect them to, and their deviations from the energetic scripts of popular music ripple like tremors through the ground.
Like its predecessor, 2015’s Garden of Delete, whose preamble consisted of a fansite for a nonexistent band and a fake interview with an alien, Age Of comes cocooned in esoteric lore. The CD art and promotional material reiterate a kind of alignment chart based on 16th-century French engravings, with each of four “ages” (bondage, ecco, excess, and harvest) illustrated by grotesque humanoid caricatures. The four images laid out in a grid evoke the right/left authoritarian/libertarian memes that proliferate on Twitter to the point of semantic satiation, only Age Of’s chart has no original referent, no known source image to corrupt—it’s pure meme.
Lopatin has said that “Myriad,” the name of his new live ensemble and part of the track title “myriad.industries,” is an acronym that stands for “My Record = Internet Addiction Disorder.” It’s a joke, probably, but Age Of does engage with the emotional exhaustion of the endless scroll. The music is preoccupied with the question of what the mind is looking for when it compulsively returns to the feed: nothing specific, but nothing redundant, either. The internet addict craves a vague novelty beyond what the channel-surfer or dial-turner seeks. The internet addict wants to be implicated in their leisure because there is no leisure anymore. Nor is there any labor. There is only attention and the objects to which it’s drawn.
The way Lopatin funnels attention through Age Of confounds deeply ingrained listening habits. “The Station,” a simmering pop number apparently written for Usher, bombards a sterile, placid guitar riff with frantic cascades of harpsichord and synthesizer. Even the voice, roboticized by effects, wants to break out of its cage; by the song’s end, it’s splintered off into an uncanny screech. “Babylon,” another vocal track buttressed by the bass tone from the “Twin Peaks” theme, overlays Lopatin’s voice with so many different versions of itself (and some backing screams from Prurient) that he starts to sound less like the orchestrator of his own music than a victim of it. “I love it when I see you in a state of disbelief,” he sings, his words corroded by harmonies falling slightly out of sync. He dissolves himself in a song that doesn’t quite sound like a song, singing with a voice that sounds less and less like a voice.
These formal disintegrations flood the record with anxiety. Even its brighter moments, like the tantalizing instrumental “Toys 2” (the one meant for Pixar, and named for Toys, a nightmarish Robin Williams comedy) tend to fall to ruin before long. The synthesizers detune, the percussion trickles away, the singing voices stutter and fade. Age Of could be an exercise in ruining songs, but like the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual, it is less interested in perpetuating pleasure than it is in examining its mechanics. What makes a song tick, and what kind of desire propels the listener through it? What makes a person want?
It is a profoundly lonely place, this album, and it would be unbearably cynical were it not for the moments of sublimity rustling through its sneers. Anohni’s voice breaks to the forefront on “Same,” a jolting track that lets her do what she does best, which is taunt annihilation and withstand it. Her voice is authoritative like nature is, lithe and flexible enough to dodge bullets, powerful without any need to adhere to architectures of power. When she re-enters the fray on “Still Stuff That Doesn’t Happen,” she brings with her all the stray voices that have percolated throughout the album, the raspy yowls and the low groans. “Speak to me,” they sing against the jazzy strut of a drum kit, twirling together like trash in a breeze. “Release me.” The moment is beautiful in ways Lopatin’s music has not before dared to be beautiful—it disarms.
In the face of extinction, the human mind seeks narrative. It wants to be the action hero diverting the disaster so that real life can continue unimpeded. Age Of floats the idea that the disaster itself might be real life. In its chaos and its relief from chaos, it stages the panic and helplessness encountered in disaster as stories worth telling on their own.