Luke Temple's new solo album Good Mood Fool is more playful and less particular than anything Temple's done in years. Though frequently gorgeous, the album's everything-in-its-right-place presentations occasionally outshine the songs' underlying melodies.

Good Mood Fool

Luke Temple already had two LPs to his name when he formed Here We Go Magic in 2009, and that band's self-titled debut is, by most measures, a solo record; only on closer "Everything's Big" does Temple find himself backed by a full band. Over three subsequent LPs, Here We Go Magic became a proper band, subject to all the checks and balances that go along with group democracy. To hear Temple tell it, Good Mood Fool, his first solo LP since Here We Go Magic's launch—his 2011 effort Don't Act Like You Don't Care was recorded before the release of HWGM's debut—never would've made it as a Magic LP; had Temple tried to inject Fool's synth-heavy dalliances with reggae, 80's R&B and lite-funk into Here We Go Magic's twinkly kraut-folk, he would've found himself swiftly outvoted. (They might've talked him out of the Arby's slogan-skirting title, too, but that's neither here nor there.) So Temple decamped to a cabin in New York and took up the task himself, with a little help from Dirty Projectors drummer Mike Johnson and Glass Ghost keyboardist Eliot Krimsky.
Fool's little more than drum machine, bass, a Juno-1 synth, and Temple's boyish, Paul Simon-ized vocals. This relatively spartan setup finds Temple sounding looser and more relaxed than he has in quite some time. Here We Go Magic's precision plinking occasionally leads to a kind of fussiness; though frequently gorgeous, their everything-in-its-right-place presentations occasionally outshine their underlying melodies. From the start, Good Mood Fool's considerably more playful and less particular than anything Temple's done in years, its production more spartan, less finicky, its songcraft sharp but not nearly as exacting. Opener "Hard Working Hand" is a more than passable stab at smoothed-out reggae; on a Burning Spear record, it'd stick out like a narc, but it's sharp enough to nick the sound without attempting to cop the spirit. "Katie", the restless pop-R&B rave-up in the Billy Ocean tradition, is even better; as he pitches falsetto'd woo to the gal on his screen, the camshow-enraptured "Katie" is Temple's anxiety-ridden take on "Ayo Technology". The limber late-afternoon funk of the slinky, strutting "Florida" is another winner, sleek without succumbing to stiffness. In light of Temple's tightly wound, fastidiously arranged back catalog, this diverse, limber opening trio feels a bit out of character. But that's precisely the idea; these were the left-turns Temple felt he couldn't take with Magic, and they lead him to intriguing places.
There's an undercurrent of bitterness behind "Those Kids" keeping it from quite reaching the heights of the songs that precedes it. Describing a meeting with an MTV bigwig, Temple expresses frustration that his music hasn't caught on with either the gatekeepers or the titular youths. "Kids" closes with a chorus of backup singers mewling "they're all such idiots"; it's a little unclear whether he means the Viacom brass or the young people he's not reaching, but in either case, the hints of vitriol seem at odds with the song's honeyed harmonies. The squirrely, sputtering "Jessica Brown Findlay" also seems to lose something in the lyrics. An homage of sorts to the "Downton Abbey" actress, "Findlay" starts out sweet enough. But when Temple starts in on Findlay's "pineapple hair and deli-counter chest," things quickly turn icky. Temple, for all his musical particularities, can be a somewhat inscrutable lyricist. But even his more innocuous wordplay's vastly preferable to the oddly-pitched tangents that pepper Good Mood Fool. And closer "Hardest Working Self-Made Mexican" is certainly the set's strangest digression. The industrious immigrant at the center of the song is broadly drawn, more caricature than character, which leaves whatever point Temple hoped to make feeling muddled.
Marital post-script "Sue" is lovely, a doleful, clear-eyed look at a relationship gone awry, easily the best song on the album's second side. But "Terrified Witness"—a sort of No Nukes song sung in retrospect—feels underwritten, and, at six minutes and change, the rigid groove of "Love Won't Receive" overstays its welcome. Fool starts out rangy and playful, but by its last few songs, the tone turns somber, and its ideas seem stretched a bit thin. It's telling, perhaps, that these three songs are the closest thing Fool has to Here We Go Magic tunes; they're fine and all, but Temple doesn't feel quite as enlivened by them as he does throughout the rest of the disc. A few awkward moments aside, Fool is at its best when Temple sounds the least like the Here We Go Magic guy; its buoyant, unfussy front half, out of character though it is, is up there with Temple's best work. Here's hoping Temple can bring a little of Fool's cavalier, hey-why-not spirit into whatever he does next.


"They tried to make me go to rehab," wails Amy Winehouse on the opening track and first single from her second album *Back to Black*. It's not typical pop song fodder, but Winehouse isn't a typical pop singer. If she winds up as popular in the U.S. as she is at home in the UK, it'll be despite her reluctance to embrace the monotonous realities of promotional mechanics. Oh, she'll talk, but there's no guarantee what she'll say. (Our favorite is her heckling of Bono at last year's Q Awards: "Shut up, I don't give a fuck!") She'll be scheduled

Back to Black

"They tried to make me go to rehab," wails Amy Winehouse on the opening track and first single from her second album Back to Black. It's not typical pop song fodder, but Winehouse isn't a typical pop singer. If she winds up as popular in the U.S. as she is at home in the UK, it'll be despite her reluctance to embrace the monotonous realities of promotional mechanics. Oh, she'll talk, but there's no guarantee what she'll say. (Our favorite is her heckling of Bono at last year's Q Awards: "Shut up, I don't give a fuck!") She'll be scheduled to perform, but there's no guarantee what she'll do, or even if she'll make it through the show. And she'll sing about her problems, but she won't give a shit what you think of them.
If this makes Winehouse read a little like Lily Allen, that's not far off the mark. Both are larger-than-life singers who've found perfect vehicles for their outsized personalities. In Allen's case, it's a cocktail of pop, reggae, and hip-hop, with a cigarette in hand; for Winehouse, it's soul, jazz, and blues with a bottle of booze. Both pay tribute to their influences, with Winehouse's lyrics featuring shout-outs to Ray Charles, Donny Hathaway, and Slick Rick, and the two even share a producer: Mark Ronson, who's also worked with everyone from Sean Paul and Macy Gray to Ghostface and Rhymefest.
But Winehouse is anything but a Lily Allen doppelgänger. After all, soul and jazz music are typically considered the province of grownups, and while Winehouse could be accused of slipping on these styles like costumes, she imbues her music with a surprisingly genuine soulfulness.
Ronson's sneaky production provides most of the album's wit: The old school backdrop to "Me & Mr. Jones" is especially winking against couplets like "What kind of fuckery is this? You made me miss the Slick Rick gig." But Winehouse's zingers (in that same song she tells her subject "'side from Sammy you're my best black Jew") and profane interjections (the title track begins "He left no time to regret/ Kept his dick wet") are only an occasional thing as she travels a well-worn lyrical path to both clinical and romantic rehabilitation.
Songs like "Love Is a Losing Game" are full of regret, even if Winehouse refuses to wallow entirely in self-pity. However, as one might expect following the declaration of "Rehab", Winehouse does spend much of Back to Black on the defensive, trying to explain why she's stayed with the same guy who's done her wrong, or, in the case of "Wake Up Alone", why her ex gives her the night sweats ("I drip for him tonight," Winehouse less delicately puts it).
It's one of the eternal themes of soul music, here spiced up with post-modern production where less forceful personalities might have gone with strictly retro emulation. The references to girl groups, northern soul, and ska are there, but no one would confuse these approximations (split evenly between Ronson and Salaam Remi, who produced Winehouse's since-disowned debut) with the real thing.
Fortunately, Winehouse has been blessed by a brassy voice that can transform even mundane sentiments into powerful statements. She may be heartbroken, but she uses that ache, twisting the emotional scars to suit her songs-- and if she often seems like the masochistic recipient of each knife twist, so be it. It's not until the album's final track, "He Can Only Hold Her", that Winehouse finally switches from first person to third, the "I"s and "me"s giving way to "he"s and "she"s, suggesting that she's finally become an objective observer, able to see her personal issues for what they are. "He tries to pacify her, 'cause what's inside never dies," she sings, and we can only assume from this new vantage that Winehouse has moved on.


On her third album, the New York rapper sounds as joyfully lascivious as ever, but slower and funkier, casting aside trifling men and centering her own self-fulfillment.

JP3

“Black women are tired,” the rapper Junglepussy recently told Dazed. “Like, we have to do so much, and you really want me to tell you how to treat me like a decent human being? No!” In fact, Junglepussy spent much of her explosive first two albums, 2014’s Satisfaction Guaranteed and 2015’s Pregnant With Success, telling men to how do exactly that: Her best songs, like her breakout single “Bling Bling,” are booming, unapologetic, and hilarious instructions on how to serve a woman’s needs, whether that be making her dinner or giving her head.
Still, on those two records, her fiery takedowns often had the ring of a Sisyphean burden—black women will always be forced to lead the way and keep others in line, ad nauseam, leaving no time for themselves. Even at her fiercest, Junglepussy sometimes had trouble practicing the self-sufficiency she preached, since it was so tied up in the actions of men and haters surrounding her (“You never greased my scalp/You never called me a Uber/You never picked no fruits for a nigga!” she hisses resentfully on Pregnant With Success’ “Nothing for Me.”)
Three years later, Junglepussy is back with JP3, which finds her ditching the last of that resentment and replacing it with a funkier, more melodic, and more carefree vibe, full of slow grooves and self-affirming lyricism. “I’ve learned so much about myself” since Pregnant With Success, she said in the same interview, and it couldn’t be clearer: JP3 has Junglepussy looking away from trifling men and toward self-fulfillment. The high-tempo verbal assaults and twerk-ready anthems are mostly gone this time, but the real difference is Junglepussy’s energy: She’s full of laughter, trying her hand at humming and singing, leaving spaces for the beat to breathe where her younger self would’ve ripped half-shouted verses. Whereas before her rhymes about sex—her go-to subject—were rattled off with an almost confrontational absurdism, on JP3, they’re just as visceral, but almost entirely in reference to herself and the beauty of her own body, leaving her anonymous partner standing far off to the side (“Thighs thick as mud/pussy never funky like a skunk” she boasts on “Get Down”).
Much of this change begins in the beats, which are simply exquisite. The production, overseen by her longtime collaborator Shy Guy, is rich, inventive, and hypnotic, and leagues more soulful and worldly than anything he’s previously provided Junglepussy. With the help of producer Say Hey, he nimbly hops from sensual, body-rolling dub (“Ready 2 Ride”) to a Kamaiyah-like Bay Area bounce (“I’m in Love”), providing Junglepussy with the kinds of lush, endlessly interesting instrumentals that few indie rappers have access to.
The album begins with “State of the Union,” maybe the only track on JP3 that is a callback to her early work. Over a RZA-esque violin sample and heavy bass, Junglepussy reestablishes herself as one of the most entertaining one-line spitters working today: “No cook crack with that black girl magic/I’m smokin’ Spike Lee joint, she just gotta have it/Everybody wanna be black, it’s so tragic,” she spits with furor. It’s a great opener, but it also serves as a growth marker for the rest of the album: By the time JP3 wraps up with the all-sung slow jam “Showers,” it’s difficult to reconcile this unbothered, blissed-out Junglepussy with the fire-spitting hellraiser just nine songs earlier.
Despite the sound switch, the principal subject matter is the same: Junglepussy is still in a league of her own when it comes to talking about sex, only this time it’s more on her terms than ever before. The Sporting Life-co-produced “I Just Want It” has her demanding head in a male-mimicking low register over flute samples and trap drums, while on “Trader Joe” she raps, with irreverent joy, “I think I like him more than I like Trader Joe’s/I’ll swallow kids if he start eating vegetables.” Best of all is “Long Way Home,” a late-night smoking groove dedicated to finessing one-night stands out of well-endowed men. “Feelin’ the dick, all up in my armpit” she chants in a chopped-and-screwed voice on the chorus, setting up Three 6 Mafia legend Gangsta Boo, whose confident, sex-filled wordplay is a clear predecessor to Junglepussy’s, and who sneers at her lover, “Damn that dick looks thick/How many inches is it?” The dirty talk is triumphant and silly, dominating and desirous, but without the gut-punch of Junglepussy’s previous work: Here, she’s diverted that aggression and energy exclusively toward female pleasure.
JP3 closes with “Showers,” a blissful and exalted cookout-ready jam, and a perfect ending to an album about being sonically and spiritually free. JP3 might sacrifice some of Junglepussy’s previously hedonistic splendor for poppier hooks and mellower vibes, but it also introduces us to a happier, more mature woman. “Scars on my body-ody/Cutting like decorations,” she sings tenderly on “Showers,” in a rare moment of autobiographical revelation. But she doesn’t elaborate. Instead, she triumphantly launches into the chorus as an antidote: “Shower with my chains on, took a shower all my chains on!” Black women are tired, and they shouldn’t have to tell people how to treat them. Yet they do, and probably always will. On JP3, Junglepussy posits that the only way to persist through never-ending struggle is to look inward for joy and acceptance, and hope that the rest of the world will come around in time.


The Atlanta rapper tries to tell the story of his rise to fame on his guest star-packed new album, but the music is all work and no inspiration.

My Turn

Lil Baby fell backward into music and made the most of it. Before 2016, he’d never rapped a word, but after serving a two-year prison sentence, he decided to give it a try, thanks to the prodding of Quality Control executives Coach K and Pierre “Pee” Thomas and his former classmate Young Thug, who paid him to leave his hood and go to the studio. After releasing seven projects in two years, the Atlanta artist took a year off and returns on his new album My Turn as something approaching a marquee act. The album title’s message is obvious: He is stepping into his star moment, but while his songs are pleasantly steady and well-balanced, he still has yet to really command attention on his own.
Lil Baby is like the inverse of Young Thug. Where Thug is explosively unpredictable, Baby is reliably inert. His mellow, lilting raps have poise, but when they lock into a groove they lose all momentum. There are songs called “Solid” and “Consistent” here, and that tells you almost everything you need to know. The album is only saved by his minor improvement as a songwriter and lyricist. He is ready to embrace his notoriety, albeit cautiously. “I never call myself a G.O.A.T., I leave that love to the people,” he hedges on “Emotionally Scarred,” a claim that seems to contradict the album’s baby goat-covered artwork.
Much of My Turn concerns the familiar calls of street life and the uncertainty that comes with pursuing a rap dream at full tilt. “They want me catch a murder, I ain’t goin’ back,” he vows on “Commercial.” Baby keeps glimpsing the world he left behind in his periphery, and his most evocative writing finds him in between worlds; on “Same Thing,” he goes plain jane because the public associates bling with thugs, and on “Gang Signs” he returns home as a philanthropist and local legend. He’s trying to tell a story here, but he’s just not much of a storyteller—his bars keep the narrative going, but he doesn’t offer enough arresting imagery to make his scenes come to life.
His supporting cast doesn’t do him any favors. Exchanges with Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert, and Future can feel like adjusting from blurriness to the clarity of corrective lenses. Uzi is reading horoscopes on long flights and trying to spend enough money to bring Kobe Bryant back to life on “Commercial.” Baby loses a shop-off to the superior showman Future on “Live Off My Closet.” Even Baby’s best bar on “We Should” (“My Rolls Royce in the projects, they look at me like I’m God”) isn’t enough to outshine Thug’s Technicolor absurdity. It isn’t that Baby underperforms in any of these duets; on the contrary, he gives everything he has. But he doesn’t really have any charisma, or flavor, or personality.
Sonically, the album has the same architects as his last two solo projects: in-house QC producer Quay Global, Tay Keith, and Wheezy. There’s additional production from Murda Beatz, DJ Paul, and Buddah Bless, most up to their usual tricks. The primary new contributor is recent Quality Control signee Twysted Genius, but he doesn’t have anything fresh to offer. With nine beats between them, Quay and Twysted Genius build out the bulk of the album, and they often sound like they’re working the same sample packs of synths, keys, hi-hats, and 808. Outside of the always-surprising Tay Keith (“Same Thing, “Commercial”), the refreshing DJ Paul (“Gang Signs”), and a soundtrack holdover (Queen & Slim’s Hit-Boy-produced “Catch the Sun”), the producers usually encourage Baby to color inside the lines.
My Turn gets the most out of Lil Baby when he plays up the stakes, or as he puts it on “Sum 2 Prove”: “They don’t wan’ see us on TV unless it’s the news/I got somethin' to prove/Yeah, I’m young, but got somethin’ to lose.” “Hurtin” lingers in the losses he’s suffered but doesn’t succumb to them. “I’ve been bustin’ on that glizzy ever since I had got robbed/I done really beat the odds,” he realizes. On “Forgot That,” his song with his 4 Pockets Full signee Rylo Rodriguez, the raps come tumbling out of him, as he attempts to illustrate the work ethic he raps about through sheer exertion. It’s that same understated diligence that has fueled his star turn. But the album is all work and no inspiration.

Quality Control / Wolfpack Global / Motown / Capitol


Recorded across a few intimate evenings at a cozy L.A. cocktail bar, these four side-long tracks of bass, drums, sax, and guitar dissolve revelatory improvisation into mesmerizing ambient atmospheres.

Jeff Parker: Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy

Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy

Jeff Parker synthesizes jazz and hip-hop with an appealingly light touch. The longtime Tortoise guitarist has a silken, clean-cut tone, yet his production takes more cues from DJ Premier than it does from a classic mid-century jazz sound. In the early ’00s, when Madlib ushered a boom-bap sensibility into the hallowed halls of the jazz label Blue Note, Parker conducted his own experiments in genre-mashing in the Chicago group Isotope 217, dragging jaunty hip-hop rhythms into the far reaches of computerized abstraction. More recently, Parker enlivened quantized beats and chopped-up samples with live instrumentation, both as leader of the New Breed and sideman to Makaya McCraven. Inverting rap’s longtime reverence for jazz, Parker has gradually codified a new language for the so-called “American art form” with a vocabulary gleaned from the United States’ next great contribution to the musical universe.
Parker’s latest, the live double LP Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, was largely recorded in 2019, while his star as a solo artist was steeply ascending. Capturing a few intimate evenings with drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and New Breed saxophonist Josh Johnson at ETA, a cozy Los Angeles cocktail bar, the record anticipates his 2020 opus with the New Breed, Suite for Max Brown. Yet Mondays amounts to something novel in 2022: It lays out long-form spiritual jazz, knotty melodies, and effortless solos over a slow-moving foundation as consistent as an 808. The results are as mesmerizing as a luxurious, beatific ambient record—yet at the same time, it’s clear that all of this is happening within the inherently messy confines of an improvisatory concert.
Across four side-long tracks, each spanning about 20 minutes, Parker and Johnson trade ostinatos, mesh together, split again into polyrhythmic call-and-response. Butterss commands the pocket with a photonegative of their lead lines, often freed from rhythmic responsibilities by the drums’ relentlessness. Bellerose exhibits a Neu!-like sense of consistency, just screwed down a whole bunch of BPMs. His kit sounds as dusty as an old sample, and his hypnotic rhythms evoke humanizers of the drum machine such as J Dilla or RZA. You could spend the album’s 84-minute runtime listening only to the beats; every shift in pattern queues a new movement in the compositions, beaming a timeframe from the bottom up. Bellerose’s sensitive, reactive playing, though, is unmistakably live. We can practically see the sweat beading on his arm when he holds steady on a ride cymbal for minutes on end, or plays a shaker for a whole LP side.
He begins the understated opener “2019-07-08 I” with feather-soft brush swirls, but on the second cut, he sets Mondays’ stride, as a simple bell pattern builds into a leisurely rhythmic stroll. Thirteen minutes in, the mood breaks. Bellerose hits some heavy quarter notes on his hi-hat; Butterss leans into a fat bassline; saxophone arpeggios, probably looped, float in front of us like smoke rings lingering in the air. It’s a glorious moment, punctuated by clinking glasses and a distant “whoo!” so perfectly placed we become aware of not only the setting, but also the supple knob-turns of engineer Bryce Gonzales in post-production. Anyone who’s heard great improvisation at a bar in the company of both jazzheads and puzzled onlookers knows this dynamic—for some, the music was incidental. Others experienced a revelation.
Lodged in this familiar situation is the question of what such “ambient jazz” means to accomplish—whether it wants to occupy the center of our consciousnesses, or resign itself to the background. The record’s perpetual soloing offers an answer. Never screechy, grating, or aggressive, each performance is nonetheless highly individual. Even when the quartet settles into an extended groove, a spotlight shines on Johnson, Butterss, and Parker in turn, steadily illuminating a perpetual sense of invention. Their interplay feels almost traditional, suggesting bandstand trade-offs of yore, yet the open-ended structure of their jams keeps it unconventional.
Mondays works in layers: Its metronomic rhythms pacify, but the performers and their idiosyncratic expressions offer ample material to those interested in hearing young luminaries and seasoned vets swap ideas within a group. In 2020, Johnson dropped his first record under his own name, the excellent, daringly melodic Freedom Exercise, while Butterss’ recent debut as bandleader, Activities, is one of the most exciting, undersung jazz releases of 2022. Akin to Parker’s early experiments with Tortoise and Chicago Underground, Johnson and Butterss’ recordings both revel in electronic textures, and each features the other as a collaborator. Mondays captures them as their mature playing styles gain sea legs atop the rudder of Parker’s guitar.
The only track recorded after the pandemic began, closer “2021-04-28” sculpts the record’s loping structure, giving retrospective shape to the preceding hour of ambience. In the middle of the song, Parker’s guitar slows to a yawn; the drums pipe down. After a couple minutes of drone, Bellerose slips back into the mix alongside a precisely phrased guitar line strummed on the upper frets, punctuated by saxophone accents that exclaim with the force of an eager hype man. Beginning with a murmur, the album ends with a bracing statement, a passage so articulated that it actually feels spoken.
Mondays drifts with unhurried purpose through genres and ideas, imprinted with the passage of time. The deliberate, thumping clock of its drumbeat keeps duration in mind, and, as with so many live albums, we’re reminded of how circumstances have changed since the sessions were recorded. Truly, life is different than it was in 2019—and not just in terms of world politics, climate change, the threat of disease, or the reality that making a living in music is harder than ever. Seemingly catalyzed by COVID-19’s deadly, isolating scourge, jazz has transformed, hybridized, and weakened tired arguments for musical stratification and fundamentalism. Even calling Mondays a “live” album is a simplification, considering how Parker and other top jazz brains have increasingly availed themselves of the studio—including, in a sparing yet dramatic way, on Mondays.
Near the end of the first track, the tape slows abruptly. The plane of the song opens to another dimension: This set, Parker seems to be saying, can be manipulated with the ease of a vinyl platter beneath a DJ’s fingers. Parker’s latest may be his first live album, but it’s also the product of a mad scientist, cackling over a mixing board. Time is dilated, curated, edited, and intercut, and the very live-ness of a concert recording turns fascinatingly, fruitfully convoluted—even when the artists responsible are four players participating in the age-old custom of jamming together in a room.


The four-song EP from the Michigan post-punk band features Kelley Deal of the Breeders and some of the most pointed and impactful songwriting of their career.

Consolation EP

The most recent LP of caustic rock from Detroit band Protomartyr, 2017’s Relatives in Descent, contained a song with a riveting name: “Male Plague.” Better still, it found frontman Joe Casey—typically a post-punk wordsmith of the compacted Mark E. Smith School, who can convey the nuance of a short story in four charmingly obtuse minutes—just chanting its title, “Male plague!/Male plague!” What a fun indictment of toxic masculinity. “Hey figurehead, what you gonna do?” Casey spouted, “Her truth moves too fast for you.” In the past, Protomartyr did what the best writers do and evoked a sense of place via grinding Midwestern humility. On “Male Plague,” however, that place was the future.
Protomartyr’s new Consolation EP continues the discernibly politicized streak of Relatives in Descent—which also touched on Trumpism and Flint, Michigan’s water crisis. It was recorded with Kelley Deal of the Breeders, who lends her salty-sweet vocals to two of its four tracks. She also arranged the delicately aslant closer, “You Always Win”—an apparent comment on mortality, on growing “weak” and “grey” with another person—bringing in friends to add cello, violin, and clarinet. On previous records, the airtight tension and boiled-over poetry of Protomartyr’s music has been so densely packed that it could feel exhausting at album-length (maybe that’s the point). But the EP form serves them well. Consolation breathes.
Opener “Wait” rumbles and bursts with the crescendoing ring of an alarm clock. It’s punctuated by the most anthemic chorus Protomartyr have done—though the song’s lovely, circling melody is really sung by guitarist Greg Ahee—and that explosive dynamic only serves Casey’s relatively abstracted verses, with lines about “a pair of fellas…punching the life out of each other” and “ironic T-shirts wet with blood.” “Same Face in a Different Mirror” sounds like a rumination on stagnant, grim parts of society coming into focus—“Ugly is intact/But now the frame is clearer”—but it turns hopeful, splitting the difference between feeling like a “terminal zero” and “feeling I’m in love.” Perhaps the sentiments require each other.
Deal—the same Deal, of course, who put a halo of angelic harmonies onto the classic Last Splash; who fed her sewing machine through a Marshall amp—makes “Wheel of Fortune” spin. All of Protomartyr’s anxious tension seems to unwind at once as the song lifts off. “Wheel of Fortune” details the grotesque waking nightmare of systematic oppression in America, which ensures some people have less a chance at survival—be it from police brutality, poisoned water, global warming, white supremacy, patriarchy, religious groups, or (as the title suggests) the predatory industry of gambling. Its churn feels endless. Casey’s lyrics are a masterful mix of oblique and literal, spelling out the bleak realities just enough. He opens with short fragments—“Water as commodity/All is comedy/Acts of God/Acts of purse-milking apostles”—that grow in length as their subject matter grows increasingly dire. “A man with a gun and a deluded sense of purpose,” Casey rattles. “A good guy with a gun who missed/A police state desperate to reach quota.” The cutting refrain, repeated with fire by Casey and Deal in tandem—“I decide who lives and who dies”—rings disturbingly true of twisted America, summarizing this index of monumental failure. It adds up to one of Protomartyr’s best songs.
When Protomartyr announced Relatives in Descent, the band mentioned the particular influence of Odyshape, the 1981 sophomore album from British feminist punk band the Raincoats. When Ahee first heard it five years ago, he said it exploded his way of thinking about music. With diffuse, woven textures and mystical, nonlinear rhythms, Odyshape is one of the all-time great examples of a feminization of rock. Protomartyr has commented, too, on how Deal’s sense of melody added “femininity” to their music of Consolation; her voice certainly adds life and levity. If Protomartyr learned anything from Odyshape, it might be the audacity to explore, to locate new methods of release—and they found a bracing clarity.


Electro-soul band's second album abandons the graceful, delicate melodies of its debut for songs with more wallop.

The Warning

It's only natural that Hot Chip would push themselves a bit after their debut Coming on Strong, a successful but safe entrée to the British electro-soul outfit. Their kitschy yet deeply affecting lyrics drew so much attention the first time around that I'd met more than a few people who said they hated the group simply because they seemed like cheeky fuckers. They missed the point, but that's another matter. Follow-up album The Warning is propulsion and power and punctuation rolled up into one, abandoning a lot of the graceful, delicate melodies of the debut for songs with more wallop. It was a necessary move-- a step forward-- and the results are mostly golden.
Of course, a lot of their pert turns of phrases are still around, as are the molten ballads ("Look After Me", "Colours") but they're usually eclipsed by the zooming, gliding synths, keyboards, and drum machines that push things forward. If their flavor was DF-Ay! before, it now sounds a bit more DF-Hey. Nowhere is that more evident than on the unsteady, maniacally fun "Over and Over", the early single that got most excited for their turn to the dancefloor. Built on the best kind of chant (one you can remember), a skulking guitar, and handclaps, the song is a standout among spastic jams like the churning Human League-esque "No Fit State" or crystalline "(Just Like We) Breakdown".
The centerpiece, though, comes in two parts, from two angles. First, the throbbing, sincere "Boy From School", which is marked by Alexis Taylor's sweetly thin vocals and the heartbroken line, "We try, but we don't belong." It's as good a pop song as has been written this year. The second, the title track, is a less direct hit and takes a minute to sink in. It's also got one of those couplets ("Hot Chip will break your legs, snap off your head/ Hot Chip will put you down, under the ground") to distract you. But like a lot of the band's best songs, it splits into three and four parts, veering into bridges where there should be choruses, verses where there should codas, and dirges where there should be melodies. It's not rocket science, but it's also not botany. "Prepare yourself for a mechanical fright" is the clarion call.
Thing is, where Coming on Strong had scattered moments of mediocrity or unrealized embellishments, this album has several irrefutable numbers-- and a couple of clangs. "Tchaparian" is needlessly jagged on an album full of round edges. "Arrest Yourself", a kinetic live staple, manages to avoid the effortless groove created onstage by trying the push the envelope with loose horn sounds and a disorienting arrangement. Their failures magnify an incomplete rotation.
As far as improvements go, The Warning isn't so much a triumph as it is a reach in the right direction. Beat maestro Joe Goddard seems to have taken more of a backseat vocally to Taylor's coo and this saps a lot of the joyful contrast from the group. Then again, the bear-like Goddard isn't much of a singer in the first place, though he's obviously got the bigger sense of humor. Their hip-hop influence has been scaled back a bit as well, turning to a punishing rhythm section stacked on top of deeper ambient sounds. The built-for-a-cathedral "Careful" opens softly and quickly erupts into choppy sample darts, then cools back down again. Its momentum and retraction is a good metaphor for the record.


Nicolás Jaar’s collaborative project for the 2020 Unsound Festival gathers Angel Bat Dawid, Laraaji, Senyawa, and a dozen more artists in a pensive, shapeshifting piece of pandemic-era live improvisation.

Weavings

By the time Krakow’s Unsound Festival launched a special online-only pandemic edition of its annual event, in September 2020, livestreams were old hat. Sitting in front of our computers and passively absorbing a two-dimensional, unidirectional broadcast shared only with our Twitter feed and a few carefully vetted fellow bubble members—roommate, spouse, house pet—was not a terribly engrossing way to experience a performance, it turned out. If this was live music, why did we feel so dead inside?
Still, musicians craved an audience. More than that, would-be collaborators craved musical company; the virus be damned, they craved shared vibrations in shared air. Nicolás Jaar, whose focus has become increasingly collective in recent years, came up with a solution: a format in which multiple improvisers would play together over the internet, in real time, dialing in from their home studios. In order to impose a sense of order on what could otherwise be chaotic, Jaar devised a novel structure of interwoven duets. Artist A would play with artist B for a predetermined duration; then artist A would drop out and artist C would join artist B. After another interval, artist D would replace artist B, and so on as the piece rolled forward. You might think of the format as a slow-motion square dance or relay race. Or, better still, a loom. Hence the title: Weavings.
Jaar and Unsound curators Mat Schulz and Gosia Plysa recruited a diverse list of collaborators: spiritual-jazz polymath Angel Bat Dawid, new-age multi-instrumentalist Laraaji, oud player Dirar Kalash, clarinetist Paweł Szamburski, cellist Resina, and folk/metal/noise musicians Wukir Suryadi and Rully Shabara (of the Indonesian duo Senyawa), among others. Rather than streaming live—a technologically risky proposition, given the project’s intricacies—the ensemble’s real-time performance was recorded to Jaar’s hard drive in separate channels. He spent the following 24 hours mixing and finessing, and for the next day’s online event, he streamed the finished recording over the web directly from his computer. Ninety-two minutes long, featuring 18 players, including Jaar himself, Weavings is the document of that process.
Despite the ambitious format and crowded virtual bandstand, Weavings is understated. A patient exploration of texture and mood, it incorporates a wide array of voices and styles into a porous, shapeshifting whole. Over the course of its run, it takes in spectral drones, mournful reeds, industrial clanking, and ghostly whispers and wails. Earthbound sounds—the rattle of small objects, the scuttling of insects—are paired with heavenly invocations and streaks of what sounds like pure light, gleaming with cosmic significance. The piece is bookended by group-improv passages featuring most of the players joining together at once, though you wouldn’t necessarily guess it from your ears alone; their restraint is remarkable. They seem to devote as much attention to listening as they do playing.
In the streamed performance, each musician was visible in their own Zoom window, like an experimental-music version of Hollywood Squares. Listening back, however, it’s not always clear who is playing at any given time; foreground and background are in constant flux, as distinctive voices filter to the front and then recede into the mix. Certain themes recur. Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument lays out shimmering pedal tones mirrored in Resina’s bowed cello. Shabara and experimental vocalist Ka Baird contribute guttural chattering noises whose staccato attack and scraped textures are echoed in Aho Ssan’s percussive electronic treatments. Dawid’s introductory vocalizations feel like a calling down of spirits; Juliana Huxtable’s sing-song poetic delivery is a rumination on blood and bruises rendered in fanciful, candy-colored detail. It’s the rare moment where the music points to a referent outside itself, but even here, Huxtable’s hypnotic intonation contributes to Weavings’ immersive pull. What’s most striking over the course of the piece is how many contrasting sounds and motifs can be folded into a form so coherent: Scraped metal, folk melodies, and fevered speaking in tongues all come to seem like they’re cut from the same cloth.
Weavings is—perhaps unsurprisingly, given the context of its creation—a pensive and even melancholy piece of music; its broadly meditative stretches are pocked with the occasional outburst of anxiety, anger, or fear. But there is a palpable sense of shared spirit in the music. It’s not something you can measure or even pinpoint, but you can hear the players joining together in service to a higher purpose. For all its restraint, Weavings feels determined and even celebratory, a declaration of defiance in the face of a microbe that tried to bring the world to a halt. Not two years later, the course of Covid has changed many times over, and it can be hard to remember what life felt like in the pandemic’s first year; some of the impetus for the work has faded from memory, and as a result, its meaning may have changed. But as one crisis has given way to another, now that Putin’s war rages just 160 miles from Krakow, perhaps Weavings takes on new meanings. It remains a powerful reminder that borders are purely notional, as well as a testament to the basic human need to come together in times of adversity. If you’re inclined to think of music in spiritual terms—as a summoning of grace, an invocation of a higher power, or a simple attempt to carve out a foothold for good in the world—you may find Weavings’ implicit message of harmonious union more needed now than ever.


In the California pop singer-songwriter’s bright, hallucinogenic world, everything glows in the dark and almost every chorus is chanted.

Juno

Remi Wolf’s musical and lyrical language speaks in zany technicolor. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter opened “Doctor,” the first song on her 2019 debut EP, You’re a Dog!, by promising, “I’d literally pee outside for you on Hollywood Boulevard.” Last year, Wolf released a follow-up, I’m Allergic to Dogs!, and notched her biggest hit to date with “Photo ID,” an ironic quarantine-era anthem (“Inside, that’s where we can be free!”) with a surreal, hyper-saturated animated video. On her new full-length, Juno, she homes her scatterbrained Californian pop into an effervescent, hook-filled record that flirts with weighty emotions but often swerves for the safety of a joke.
Wolf’s style manages to be funky without sounding cloyingly retro; at times the production on Juno is so shiny it edges toward hyperpop fluorescence. The first half of the album is entirely co-produced by Wolf with collaborator Jared “Solomonophonic” Solomon, whose groovy riffs and guitar shredding lend heft to the songs’ squiggly squelches. But every ounce of sunshine is tempered by grit; Wolf’s voice retains its powerful rasp even when she stretches it into absurd shapes. Seconds into opener “Liquor Store,” it’s woven into sour-sweet harmonies with the twang of a Duane Allman guitar lick.
Wolf has said she wants her music to be “upbeat and danceable,” and that’s certainly true of Juno: Whether soulful or playful, happy or numb, every line and note is crammed into the kooky aesthetic. The lyrics are so full to the margins with wisecracks that it can be hard to discern a narrative arc—or, really, any way to engage other than sitting back, pulling on the weed pen, and sharing the giggle. But hidden between the wry asides and na-na-na choruses are murmurs of discontent. Bright and hallucinogenic as the music may be, “Liquor Store” is about Wolf’s experience getting sober, and through all the gags, Juno is an album about fitting uncomfortably into adulthood. On the frenetic “Quiet on Set,” Los Angeles is a dizzying movie lot where everything feels like it could fold up and roll away at any moment; on closer “Street You Live On,” Wolf contorts her voice until a song about feeling torn apart by a breakup sounds like a playground chant.
An appealing weariness underlines these songs: Just listen to the squeaky three-part harmonies of “Front Tooth” that squeal, “This just don’t feel like it’s supposed to.” In Wolf’s relentlessly upbeat world, where everything glows in the dark and almost every chorus is chanted, Juno finds tension when it lets a bit of melancholy seep in, as on the muted coda of “Volkiano,” or the playful production of “Sally,” whose incongruous pairing of acoustic guitar and a high-tempo electronic drum break sounds like a set-up for a punchline, but instead disarms with its earnestness.
In “Quiet on Set,” Wolf sings about how she doesn’t want to “be a Debbie Downer.” But it would be a shame to let a commitment to danceable music or a wacky persona hold her back from exploring her artistic range. Somewhere around Juno’s ninth or 10th track, the phantasmagoria begins to feel surprisingly monochromatic, and the idea of Wolf toning it down starts to sound appealing. The gags and the pathos are a package deal, but once all the jacks are back in their boxes, it’s worth asking if Wolf could be even more compelling as a real person than she is as a cartoon.


Ditching the springy Europop of 2004's Deep Cuts, Sweden's the Knife here pits dark, ghostly electro backdrops against elastic vocals, which they mash through a wringer of digital manipulation. A far cry from the duo's friendly first singles, Silent Shout gorily births the Knife's mutant twin. The result is creepy enough to warrant its own genre: haunted house.

Silent Shout

One of the prevailing critical talking points surrounding the release of Radiohead's Kid A had to do with Thom Yorke's willful defilement of his own vocals. Remember the reactions? Those desperate for the band to remain in the golden-throated glory days of The Bends puzzled over the move before ultimately chalking it up to a function of Yorke's inscrutable eccentricity; others cited interviews in which Yorke professed to be sick of his own voice as proof there was a more sympathetic method to his madness. But despite all the peripheral talk about the band's blossoming love of electronic and experimental music, few critics advanced the simplest theory, which was that Radiohead had completely succumbed to its own lust for the textures of dance music. No wonder those vocals had to go.
Vocal-fronted acts in dance and electronic music have tangled for years with how to rectify the textural freshness afforded by synths, samplers, and computers with the relative milque-toastiness of the human voice. The disco/house solution has been to lubricate vocals with a glossy coating of filters and vocoders; electro's has been to marry cold, bristly analogs with deadpan vocal affect; IDM's has been to chop, slice, and dice; and a number of general purpose dance acts have decided that multiplicity (by way of an endless procession of guest vocalists) is the key to staying energized. That said, only a handful of electronic full-lengths have navigated the vocal/textural divide as inventively as and refreshingly as Kid A. The latest is Silent Shout.
The brainchild of Swedish siblings Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson, the Knife have released three records, each an exponential improvement over the last. Although the last, 2004's Deep Cuts, boasted the shimmering "Heartbeats"-- a sort of "99 Luftballons" for the techno set, since covered by up-and-coming indie darling José Gonzalez-- it was also something of a mess, spitting up steel drum samples, happy hardcore breaks, and innocuous synthpop riffs. A much tighter, laser-guided record, Silent Shout finds the duo honing in on a specific mood, and at last, perfecting a signature sound. As evidenced by the Chris Cunningham-esque creature adorning the promotional material and artwork of the album's debut single, the operative adjective here is "evil." Along with recent outings from Mu and Cristian Vogel, Silent Shout achieves a forbidding cold-bloodedness by melding contemporary electronic sounds with a grotesque vocal palette. Call it "haunted house."
As menacing as it is hooky, this is some bracing stuff. It helps that Dreijer's arrangements have become more assured and refined over time-- from the rushing percussion and synth flares of "Neverland" to the hall of plexiglass mirrors wonkiness of "We Share Our Mother's Health", he frequently finds a striking balance between minimalism and dissonance. But, as alluded above, Andersson's vocals do the bulk of the work. With "Heartbeats"-- not to mention her guest spot on Röyksopp's slept-on "What Else Is There"-- she proved that her shrill voice (think Björk by way of Ari Up by way of Siouxsie Sioux by way of Mu's Mutsumi Kanamori) was capable of magic in its natural form, but little of Silent Shout grants us that pleasure.
Here, her vocals are almost always multi-tracked, with at least one of those tracks run through a pitch shifter or octave filter or something similar, usually to genuinely creepy result. On the record's eponymous horrorshow opener, she sounds like she's duetting with Zuul; "The Captain" runs her vocal through an exciter and pitch-shifts it up to mimic the Oriental scale; "Still Light" has her singing feebly into a ceiling fan from a hospital bed; and "One Hit" is possibly the only song in the world that could be reasonably classed "goblin glam" (note: that means it's great). An early contender for best record of the quarter, here's hoping Silent Shout inspires similar imagination and pushing outwards; after all, no matter how heady and interior electronic music allows itself to become, it could never get as scary as the world outside.


Where Lorely Rodriguez’s debut album brought a refreshing dose of weirdness to the crowded field of alt-pop R&B, her follow-up is more of an anodyne amalgam of 2018’s pop trends.

Us

Me, the first album by Lorely Rodriguez’s project Empress Of, was an astonishing debut. In a supercrowded field, Rodriguez’s production distinguished itself with all-too-rare menace and oomph, like the constant mallet hits of “Kitty Kat,” or the sumptuous electro-house grotto of “Water Water.” Making an alt-pop R&B album in 2015 (or any time in the past decade) is kind of like starting a fast-casual cronut chain in 2013, but listening to Me, the unlikely happens: The trend doesn’t seem trendy.
Us differs from its predecessor in two ways. One’s in the title—where Me was entirely self-produced, on Us Rodriguez enlisted outside producers and songwriters like Dev Hynes, duo DJDS (Kanye West, Khalid, Kacy Hill), Cole M.G.N. (Ariel Pink, Christine and the Queens) and Spanish producer Pional (remixes for Chairlift and the xx). The other way’s in the interviews; as Rodriguez told Pitchfork, she wanted an album that wasn’t “as emotionally isolating as [Me]”. Less emotionally isolating, in music, usually means “happier,” and “happier” means “poppier”— more palatable, fitting more nicely in more playlists. Me wasn’t not poppy, but it wasn’t formulaic. There’s trop-house on “Standard,” but it’s been pulled apart like a carcass. “Threat” is a dance track with a drop, placed at the precise second the drop goes, but the drop is distorted, exuberant, menacing, weird.
Very little on Us can be called weird. If you were a music supervisor in 2040, commissioning a stock soundtrack for a movie set in 2018—the exact amalgamation of sounds that’d root audiences in this year—it would sound a lot like this. Me, despite frequent reductive comparisons to Grimes or FKA twigs, was singular. But Us practically begs for comparisons—and comparisons to more formulaic artists. The inspirational soul-pop of “I’ve Got Love” recalls recent Kelly Clarkson. “Timberlands,” in its winsome delivery and Daria-like eye-rolling, could be an Alessia Cara song, and its chorus launches into those pitch-shifted vocal squiggles that are ubiquitous from Kygo to Calvin. “Love for Me” and “Just the Same” are the dancehall/house/synth puree that radio labels “trop-house.” The latter adds a pinch of “Lovefool”—a blend so hyper-specifically reminiscent to this exact moment it might as well have come from a radio study involving microseconds of listening time. (Since Mitski’s “Nobody” exists, it isn’t even the first “Lovefool” rip in the past few months.)
The lyrics, too, are simpler, and deliberately so: “A younger version of me would try to mask a lot of stuff by being dreamy,” Rodriguez told Pitchfork. “Sometimes people can be uncomfortable by how direct my lyrics are [on this album].” And sure, directness is great. There’s just a line between directness and telling versus showing, and lines like “I don’t even smoke weed, it gives me anxiety” fall on the wrong side of it—particularly given the metronome-stiff 4/4 delivery of the melody. Other lyrics are just cliches: “Feel like I’m on the outside looking in”; “Eating out the palm of your hand.” Others are retreads: “Tear my clothes off like I was a paycheck,” from Me, is a great and oft-quoted line, and it’s almost heard again on “Just the Same”: “I want you on top of me like a paperweight.” The repetition almost renders the first track less impressive, like both songs came of flipping through the P’s in the dictionary.
Rodriguez is an excellent songwriter when she’s on her game. The bilingual “Trust Me Baby” genuinely does sound direct, though Rodriguez’ plaintive delivery does as much for that as the lyrics. And Dev Hynes-assisted “Everything to Me” is in another class entirely, a story of friendship captured in fleeting snapshots of characteristically New York moments: “Drinking beer out of the bag, watching cars and yellow cabs”; “Everyone on the roof is in bathing suits, but there’s nowhere to swim.” Crucially, Rodriguez leaves the tension to subtext and to the instrumental: a synth track that prickles with an unsettled melody, or Hynes’ uneasy harmonies.
This attention to detail is welcome, and Rodriguez and her co-producers do as much with the pop template as they can. An airhorn shows up halfway through “Love for Me,” as if to herald the arrival of a newer, more bracing track (albeit one that doesn’t come). “I Don’t Even Smoke Weed” dedicates a good chunk of its runtime to a synth-organ solo. “I’ve Got Love” adds a frenetic acid-synth underpinning and gives it arrangement little pauses and trail-offs that beg to be drawn out more. When tension slips in, it’s generally for the better. “Again” is a fairly standard ballad, but its sleepy expanse and dreamy melody are welcome amid the MOR. The drama of “All for Nothing” is even more welcome: a stormy dispatch from a troubled relationship set amid squalls of sawtooth synths, pained vocal runs, and an almost hymn-like bridge. It’s the closest track here to Us—but compared to “Water Water,” it’s more like a breeze in a puddle. It’s frustrating, really: a hugely talented songwriter and producer, thwarted by trends. Best-case scenario, they’ll let her find a larger audience—and money and license to once again reach Me’s heights.


The most crafty and evasive MC lays bare his complicated life. This late-career gem is soulful and diamond-sharp, confronting the failings and legacy of Shawn Carter and America.

4:44

4:44 isn’t JAY-Z’s Lemonade, a response to Lemonade, or a Lemonade companion piece. The album is certainly built around a betrayal, but his duplicity, the corresponding apology, and his reassessment are vehicles for his own maturation. Before, he was unfadable, the supreme hustler without error. Fatherhood has eroded some of that cool, but 4:44 deconstructs an entire worldview. This is Hov’s gospel, a Shawn Carter retrospective measuring missteps and triumphs, wondering aloud if his work will appreciate in value, and what exactly is worth valuing.
It only takes JAY-Z 36 minutes to create the historical artifact he’s wanted to make for years, a tell-all document to be hung in the halls of rap about infidelity and outgrowing friends, the way family shapes us and the way we carry those burdens into parenthood, and about evolving into more complete versions of ourselves. But, above all else, 4:44 is about legacy: how Jay will be remembered, what he’s leaving to his children, what he’s done for the culture, and what he’s trying to do for society. Every angle he creates is informed by blackness (on “Legacy” he raps, “We gon’ start a society within a society/That’s major, just like the Negro League/There was a time America wouldn’t let us ball/Those times are now back”), as “The Story of O.J.” states outright in its hook and “Moonlight” insinuates more subtly. Inside these personal revelations, one of rap’s greatest thinkers rediscovers his sharpness.
Jay hasn’t been this precise or proficient in a decade, perhaps because he’s finally interested in disclosing the realest parts of himself. There’s mention of Solange drama and a sneak Kanye diss, but that’s flotsam around the heart of the record. Some of the flows are rough around the edges, and he isn’t as nimble in and out of cadences as he used to be, but he compensates with carefully considered schemes and a fluidity that has come to characterize his work. These are finely-tuned elegies for the old JAY-Z, for the old Brooklyn, for a broken marriage, for rap kayfabe. The closing verses on “Smile” and “Marcy Me” are among the most well-balanced and technically sound in a storied career defined by such performances. He is alternately full of slick punches (“My therapist said I relapsed/I said, ‘Perhaps I Freudian slipped in European whips’”) and full of pathos (on “4:44”: “I apologize, our love was one for the ages and I contained us/And all this ratchet shit and we more expansive/Not meant to cry and die alone in these mansions”; on “Smile”: “The more I reveal me, the more they ’fraid of the real me”). 4:44 may lack the Cohiba panache of Jay’s greatest albums, but it’s by far his most thoughtful one.
That thoughtfulness, of course, comes at a price. Like Magna Carta Holy Grail, 4:44 was originally a Tidal exclusive released in partnership with a company trying to hawk cell phones. As a test run, Magna Carta was beamed into a million Samsung phones as a harebrained attempt to make money and go platinum the day the album was released. The latest collaboration was equally inelegant: new and existing Sprint customers were given a complementary Tidal trial; those who signed up for Tidal without Sprint after the album was released couldn’t at first access it, unless they had the voucher code “sprint,” which came with a download. (Eventually, all Tidal subscribers were given access.) There is a bit of a disconnect between Jay selling his darkest, most personal album to a corporation, and the added contradiction of championing black-owned business while recouping profits for a telecommunications giant.
But Jay is at least aware of the conflicts and tries to reconcile the inconsistencies—he treats the business venture as another hustle. On “Legacy,” he raps of these deals as a means to further his line and benefit his people: “My stake in Roc Nation should go to you/Leave a piece for your siblings to give to their children too/Tidal, the champagne, D'USSÉ, I'd like to see/A nice piece fund ideas from people who look like we.” The move makes sense given that Jay’s defining principle has always been freedom through commerce. He does make the mistake of conflating his own business conquests with a scalable solution for economic inequality and white supremacy, which is both idealistic and naive. But his sustainable-wealth tutorials never come off as preachy and there are still lessons to be learned about prosperity and advancement, particularly when read as a self-help guide for rap stars.
Though Jay proves himself a more than capable MC, it's No I.D. who does much of the heavy lifting. As the producer of all 10 beats on 4:44, the Chicago beat-maker builds a dusty soul feel that suits Jay far better than the production on Magna Carta, which leaned unnaturally on the contemporary. The samples aren’t just aesthetically beautiful but profound in context. They speak when Jay is silent, often saying what he can’t. On “The Story of O.J.,” which notes the inescapable shadow of colorism, Nina Simone, whose very melanin informed her politics, sings loudly, “My skin is black.” On the apologetic title track, Hannah Williams makes plain Jay’s shame: “I’m never gonna treat you like I should!” On the inheritance-bearing “Legacy,” which advocates for black independence, Donny Hathaway speaks it into existence: “Someday we’ll all be free.” “Bam Bam” and “Fu-Gee-La” are used as more on-the-nose sonic cues, both women’s voices distinct and recognizable, their echoing words evoking a specific connection to each song’s theme. A chorus of women are the bearers of strength and understanding on 4:44; not just Nina, Lauryn Hill, Sister Nancy, Kim Burrell, and Hannah Williams, his daughter Blue Ivy, Beyoncé and his mother Gloria Carter, who bravely comes out as a lesbian on the song “Smile.” “Love who you love,” Carter says, “because life isn't guaranteed.” This intergenerational ensemble helps Jay unlock these reflections on honesty, acceptance, and resolution.
Though accompanied by a tasteful visual component, detailed annotations, and eloquent thoughts from Kendrick Lamar, Will Smith, Chris Rock, and more, the person and personhood of JAY-Z remain at the album’s center. 4:44 neatly packs his baggage and then makes a mess unpacking his legacy. It’s true, Jay’s wordplay and legendary pith don't sound dated when they’re peppered on top of his personal failings and potent ruminations on black financial liberation. He surveys ideas on wealth and success with a confidence that makes even his most clumsy boasts about not going ham on the ’Gram seem sophisticated. Rap’s biggest winner coolly sustains his biggest losses.


Sub Pop debut from these chaotic Santa Cruz psych-feeders beefs up their production values to touch down as their hardest-hitting record to date. Drawing influence from Zeppelin, Hendrix, and Hawkwind, Blue Cathedral scales back the wanton experimentation of their previous albums to fire off post-Vietnam rounds of knotted feedback, monolithic riffs and outer-space jams. And perhaps its most impressive feat? At 53 minutes, it almost feels short.

Blue Cathedral

All ye indie hacks dressed in psych's clothing oughta hang up your underused echoplexes and unprocessed Blue Cheer albums, because from here on in, y'all shall be measured against Blue Cathedral, Comets on Fire's blistering full-length number three.
Hyperbole's a scam-- and most shameful in the voice of a seasoned critic-- but from the initial sawhorse pummeling of "The Bee and the Cracking Egg" to the last-gasp strains of "Blue Tomb", it's clear this intense collection commands a sense of largess, as well as some sort of mystically heightened language. With all sincerity, I can report that these sludge denizens have burnt-to-a-crisp every ounce of ashy acidic energy currently floating around the hazy rock 'n' roll atmosphere. Though Ethan Miller and Ben Flashman formed Comets on Fire less than five years ago, these hymns feel centuries old: Sometimes bludgeoning, always regal, Blue Cathedral is a calcified, hippified holy place. Begin your pilgrimage...
Expanding the multi-textured promise of Field Recordings from the Sun, here Comets throw down even more explosive hyperactivity. Still nodding to Pink Floyd, Iron Butterfly, Led Zeppelin, Hawkwind, and the less known sounds of Monoshock, the crew lights out into its own sweaty territory. With these eight tracks, the quintet's completed an impressive transformation from crunchy garage-rock stonemasons cribbing tropes to heady, mathy enfant terribles decimating Freakout City, USA.
Like Field Recordings, Blue Cathedral was recorded at Louder Studios by The Fucking Champs' Tim Green-- so there's really no explanation as to why these sounds are so stadium-sized and crystal clear. Better mics? A new dose of inspiration? More likely, it's the official addition of Six Organs of Admittance raga whiz Ben Chasny on guitar two. He'd played with the band in the past, but now that he calls himself a bona fide Comet, perhaps he's allowing himself a few more aesthetic liberties. Or maybe, just maybe, leaving Santa Cruz for San Francisco and Oakland offered differently processed water and a worthwhile change of scenery. Whatever the case, the Bay Area group's purity of intention and sound is stronger here than on any previous offering.
Musically, there are a bevy of fierce rockers, occasional saxophone distress signals, blissful chill zones: The instrumental, "Pussy Footin' the Duke" drifts into a relaxed milky way space probe with regal organ breakdowns, tender ebony-and-ivory arpeggios, and a my-guitar-gently-weeps melodic sense. As such a title would suggest, "Whiskey River" features gravelly rock vocals and frolicking echoplex that twists and darts within an overhauled Southern rock template; it dissolves into the wistful "Organ", an anomalously brief, melancholic fit of stargazing. The spiraling asteroids of "Brotherhood of the Harvest" performs triumphant astronomy-- I can see the metal guys getting teary over its discordant-to-majestic ebbs and flows. The knockout punch, "Blue Bomb" whips up the most languidly, ecstatic opus of a career built upon such outer-realm ecstasy: Lay back and whittle acid-rock and solar boogie-woogie notations on the surface of the sun as it expands.
Beyond individual tracks, Blue Cathedral is a well-curated whole: The song cycle mixes noise and rest with stops on a dime-- in the midst of a sludgy solo, a hook dismantles itself and reforms, turning repetition into mantra. Living up to their evocative name, Comets on Fire's music is loud and harsh, and despite that Miller's screamed lyrics are largely indecipherable, Blue Cathedral is surprisingly not at all difficult.
Avoiding sentimentality and the weight of an overblown intellectual message, this hedonistic outing could bring fans of all persuasions together as one tinnitus-toting family: stoners, indie rockers, metal heads, classic rock fans, open-minded gutter punks, non-ironic mullet owners, and even your older sister will join hands and find some riff or virtuosic accent to hold close to their heart and enjoy. In anticipation of that inspired moment, lift up your warm brews and repeat after me: Here's to the hard rock album of the summer and the backyard barbecues it will inspire, and to uncontested tofu pups basting alongside all-beef hot dogs, forever and ever, amen.


Italians Do It Better producer Johnny Jewel (Glass Candy, Chromatics) was originally tapped to score last fall's blockbuster movie, Drive, but much of his music went unused. Themes for an Imaginary Film is presumably that score, but stands alone as a well-rounded portrait of a key figure in the American electronic music landscape.

Themes For an Imaginary Film

Themes for an Imaginary Film* *arrives following the release of Drive, the film which Italians Do It Better star and Italo-disco producer Johnny Jewel was originally tapped to soundtrack. But much of his work (created with assistance from longtime collaborator Nat Walker of Chromatics and Desire) went unused in lieu of Cliff Martinez's score. There's no point in pretending that the Imaginary Film of this collection's title isn't that movie. The cover depicts a steering wheel and dashboard. The intro track begins with vehicle sounds. And the lengthy 37-track score suits Drive's distinctive blend of grit, glamour, and abject loneliness. Befitting its standalone release, though, this project does stand alone, and Themes for an Imaginary Film makes for an engrossing listen in a way that many film scores don't.
Maybe it's because we can't hear the score over Drive itself, but Themes for an Imaginary Film makes up for its lack of a visual counterpart by telling a story of its own. Evocative, stirring, yet restrained, Jewel's mixture of eerie near-silences, ominously bubbling synths, and tearjerking melodies (rendered by real-life viola and cello players) is a formidable combination.
For anyone expecting a quasi-album full of orchestral overtures or ambient mood pieces, Themes for an Imaginary Film's opening run will set you right: "City of Dreams" and "Over the Edge" are driven by Jewel's usual assortment of grainy analog synths and brittle guitars, and there's even a slight beat underlaid, though it's more like a faint heartbeat than the disco-driven rhythms of Glass Candy or Chromatics. But by the time we get to track six ("Outside Looking In"), the beats disappear and are replaced by moody, glacial waves of sound, reminding us that this is, in fact, a film soundtrack.
Appropriately, Jewel's sonics are adjusted for their new setting. Though he uses his trademark sounds well, the claustrophobic, sweaty-club vibe that defines Chromatics and Glass Candy is completely absent. Compositions like the fantastic "Behind the Wheel" are either left completely dry, with their synth elements at the fore sounding bigger and clearer (the harshly distorted "Death Mask" is almost wince-inducing), or awash with reverb, like the woozy "The Maze" or the lonely electric piano lament "Hall of Mirrors". The spare, disconsolate atmosphere perfectly complements the film it was meant for, but it also makes for an immersive listen, with an unusual amount of space allowed for within Jewel's music.
At two hours and 37 tracks long, Themes for an Imaginary Film is not exactly easy to digest in one sitting. But just as it bypasses many of the caveats associated with film scores, so it does with overlong albums: Themes works as well as mood music as it does close listening, and the way it swims between rhythm-driven beatscapes and ambient swells provides enough tension for it to unobtrusively grab your attention every once in a while. There's never too much drama, and there's never too much silence. The record is immaculately paced.
For you impatient listeners out there, a number of highlights are worth taking out of their original context. In addition to the aforementioned, "Magic Gardens" features an overwhelming synth line that sounds like the "Streets of Philadelphia" refrain blotting out the sun, and with some fleshing out, the teasingly short "Nightshift" (appearing twice) could easily be a Chromatics stunner. The lack of any sort of human presence-- outside of the automated voice that begins the score and the ambulance sirens and police radio that appear chillingly halfway through-- is shattered with the album's closer "Streets of Fire". Performed almost entirely a cappella by Chromatics singer Ruth Radelet, the song is a stunningly naked, somber ending to the 2.5 hours that precede it. Combining plaintive lyrics with a nursery-rhyme melody, it trades the dangerous seductiveness or dirty street suavity of Jewel's other projects for pure sorrow.
Themes for an Imaginary Film isn't a decadent disco soundtrack like Goblin might have made, nor a noodly synth odyssey à la John Carpenter or Vangelis. Rather, it's something completely Jewel's own, blending his distinctively fragile synthetic textures with a suitably cinematic realism that he's rarely let show. Whether you treat it as background music, incidental listening, or a two-hour magnum opus, Themes for an Imaginary Film is a well-rounded portrait of a key figure in the American electronic music landscape.


Almost unbelievably, the French master's best work was out of print in North America. Light in the Attic rectifies that error.

Serge Gainsbourg: Histoire de Melody Nelson

Histoire de Melody Nelson

Serge Gainsbourg had no great attachment to genre. By the time he came to rock music, in his early 40s, the French star had traced his oblique, provocative course through chanson (French vocal music), jazz, and light pop. He'd made percussive café jams about suicide and given Eurovision popstrels France Gall and Françoise Hardy songs full of blowjob puns. Later on he'd make a rock'n'roll album about the Nazis and a reggae take on the French national anthem. A pattern emerges: Gainsbourg hops from style to style, but with a terrific instinct for finding the most startling content for any given form.
So it's no surprise his rock work-- the early 1970s albums, of which Histoire de Melody Nelson is the first and finest-- was so original. Melody Nelson is a collaboration with composer and arranger Jean-Claude Vannier, who assembled a bunch of top sessionmen for the album. But Gainsbourg and Vannier had little interest in the conventions that had accreted around early 70s rock. Like a lot of 1971 records, Histoire de Melody Nelson is a concept album: Unlike most, it's only 28 minutes long. The songs are lavishly orchestrated, yet the dominant instrument isn't guitar or organ but rather Herbie Flowers' lascivious, treacly bass, playing a seedy, rambling take on funk.
That bass is the first sound you hear on Melody Nelson, quietly tracking up and down in a windscreen-wiper rhythm: Gainsbourg starts talking in French 30 seconds later, describing a night drive in a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. The album is routinely described as "cinematic," but the music is more of a mindtrack than a soundtrack-- a tar pit of introspection when Gainsbourg's brooding narrator is alone at the record's beginning and end, then giddy and savage by turns as he conducts his affair with the 15-year-old Melody across the short tracks in the album's middle. One of these-- "Ballade de Melody Nelson"-- is, even at two minutes, one of Gainsbourg's most assured and alluring pop songs.
A lot of Gainsbourg's records are hard sells for Anglophone ears-- the music is there to illuminate and pace the man's riotous, sensual wordplay. But Gainsbourg's alliance with Vannier produced a true collaboration: The arrangements seem to respond almost intuitively to the twists in Gainsbourg's language and narrative, to the point where they're carrying as much storytelling weight as the words. Even if your French stops at "bonjour", the music lets you know that this is a record about a dark, obsessional love. On "L'hôtel Particulier", for instance-- describing the sleazy grandeur of the rented rooms where the narrator and Melody make love-- Gainsbourg's voice shudders with lust and dread, and the music responds, flares of piano and string breaking into the song over an impatient bassline.
The actual story of Histoire de Melody Nelson is pretty negligible in any case-- man meets girl, man seduces girl, girl dies in freak plane crash. Melody herself (played by Jane Birkin, Gainsbourg's then-lover) is a cipher-- a breathed name, a ticklish squeal or two, and red hair. The album is all about its narrator: A natural obsessive just looking for an object; introspective before he meets Melody, more so after her death. First and final tracks "Melody" and "Cargo Culte" are musical siblings, with only the wordless chorales on "Cargo Culte" really distinguishing them.
Together these songs take up more than half the record, and when people claim Melody Nelson as an influence, it's almost certainly with this pair in mind. The soundworld they create is like nothing else in rock-- orchestra, bass, and voice circling one another, blending slow funk, intimate mumbling, and widescreen scope. One precedent is the epic soul Isaac Hayes had been pioneering, but where Hot Buttered Soul is full of warmth and engagement, the bookend tracks of Melody Nelson are a trip through far more hostile territories, the black spaces of a man's interior.
Gainsbourg realized he'd made something special-- he named his publishing company Melody Nelson after his fictional muse-- but, restless as ever, he didn't follow it up: His next album was a sequence of pretty acoustic songs, mostly about shit. Herbie Flowers, whose bass is the undertow pulling the album together, surfaced a year later playing on Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side", whose bassline is the first ripple of Melody Nelson's wider pop culture influence. Since then it's been left to others-- Jarvis Cocker, Beck, Tricky, Air, Broadcast-- to pick up this record's breadcrumb trail. But Gainsbourg's dark focus, and Vannier's responsiveness, aren't easily equalled. This reissue on luxuriously hefty vinyl is the first time the album's been released in the U.S.-- a superb opportunity to hear a record that's been occasionally imitated but never matched.


In the three years since the last Arp album, Alexis Georgopoulos has clearly spent some time thinking about how to retool this project. On his new MORE, he settles into a more song-oriented incarnation that is sometimes unrecognizable from Arp's spacey ambient work.

More

It's been a while since Alexis Georgopoulos worked under his Arp moniker, leaving three years trailing in the wake of his last full-length album, The Soft Wave. He's worked in art and modern dance in the interim, but Georgopoulos has clearly spent some time thinking about how to retool this project as well. The Soft Wave was all balmy synth textures and endlessly repeating figures, sometimes lightly prickled by waves of bass and distorted guitar. Georgopoulos found his voice toward the close of that record, forgoing his mostly instrumental work to deliver a pitch-perfect pastiche of Brian Eno's 70s vocal work on "From a Balcony Overlooking the Sea". Surprisingly, it's a thread he picks at for the bulk of MORE, settling into a more song-oriented incarnation of Arp that might cause people familiar with his older work to check the package to make sure it's not some other band.
Where Georgopoulos has landed is somewhere in-between various strains of the British art school tradition, where the mundane and the fantastic are equally enthralling. It's part Roxy Music sci-fi fantasia, part Blur down-the-chip-shop scruffiness. Georgopoulos is interested in glamour for sure-- song titles here include "High-Heeled Clouds" and "A Tiger in the Hall at Versailles"-- but it's a scruffy, vaudevillian form of it. The sad, clangorous end to "Clouds" feels like a paean to actors who couldn't quite make it, to singers who had a shot at the big time and just fell short. It's heavy on pastiche, but very well done at times. You won't hear a better piece of Eno worship than "Judy Nylon" this year. Even the title is wonderfully Eno-esque. It's too bad Georgopoulos waits until the closing track, "Persuasion", to get anywhere near the same sense of pop euphoria again.
So there's a strong sense of someone not reaching particularly hard to get beyond their influences, but even that takes on an appropriate hue as the album progresses. MORE edges into the feel of low-rent theater at times, where the makeup starts to run under the lights, where the performer on stage is revealed to be a fraud. Georgopoulos does a blues track and he calls it "(MORE) BLUES". He's emptied out pop and found a bunch of dead ends, all circling back in on themselves. Still, this isn't an exercise in the futility of writing this stuff in 2013; it's more like a light, cheerful prod at the parameters of pop. Along the way we get plenty of ambient interludes, hints of Brill Building pop, a dose of Beatles-y goodness. There's a sense Georgopoulos isn't sure what Arp should be, allowing him to resist being shaped, packaged, and neatly filed away.
In among all the switching up there's a centerpiece to all of this, if one can exist in such a baffling, un-centered piece, titled "Gravity (For Charlemagne Palestine)", which is one-part Steve Reich repetitive build, one-part Spiritualized-style astral gazing. Naturally, going from that to the cheeky end-of-seaside-pier tracks takes some adjusting. But MORE is an album that takes some time to settle in, to really get to grips with all its diverse tendencies. Already it feels like it could become a weightier work over time if Georgopoulos leaves all this behind and moves on elsewhere, causing this album to perpetually spin in its own odd orbit. It's mostly a delight to return to, with its misshapen ways sometimes working toward a bigger picture until Georgopoulos flushes it all down the u-bend via another baffling turn. Here he's got a musical outlet that's not defined at all, and that's a strange and occasionally beautiful thing.


There are few emerging artists more polarizing than Travis Scott. After releasing a solid buzz-building free studio album, Days Before Rodeo*,* last year, Scott follows it up with his long-awaited major debut, Rodeo, a master class in the pyramid scheming of rap industry politics.

Rodeo

There are few emerging artists more polarizing than Travis Scott, he of the dual deals (Grand Hustle as a rapper and G.O.O.D. Music as a producer) and the punk rock antics, a Kanye West progeny who is continuously changing shape. One minute he’s Kid Cudi, the next he’s Young Thug. The rager has made a living parlaying aesthetics into musical capital, but there’s value in his ability to repackage styles and sounds into something that requires little to no unpacking. After releasing a solid buzz-building free studio album, Days Before Rodeo, last year, Scott follows it up with his long-awaited major debut, Rodeo, a master class in the pyramid scheming of rap industry politics.
Travis Scott studied carefully at the Kanye West School of Maximalism, where sounds are expensive and songs are sumptuous with rich, interlocking details and meticulously selected guests. Since releasing his debut EP, Owl Pharaoh, in 2013 (and perhaps even before) he’s been honing a sixth sense for emphasizing gravitas. His greatest trick is making songs feel big and important. But Scott has cobbled together a composite identity to compensate for lacking his own. He’s quickly earned a rep as a shameless biter, an aesthetic bender with no regard for ownership or authorship—a claim given credence by Rodeo’s second single, the Swae Lee-imitating "Antidote".
This has become the enduring criticism of Scott’s work so far: That he’s a skilled impersonator posing as a creative, a mime playing puppetmaster. (There are at least three alleged reports of creative theft, which led to this takedown in Deadspin.) But this narrative overshadows the more glaring holes in his music. Travis Scott isn’t good at rapping—he often bawls out clunky phrases that dawdle into banality ("Always hit the gas like I broke wind")—and his self-proclaimed status as an auteur isn’t dictated by his own talent, but by the talent of those surrounding him. "Who do I owe? Nigga, no one," he boasts on opener "Pornography", when he’s actually deeply indebted to those in or adjacent to the Kanye Think Tank and the others he’s wrangled based on that affiliation.
One thing Scott does very well is squirm through openings onto bigger platforms, which is a talent in and of itself. He is one of rap’s premier young capitalists, an opportunist deft in the use of social currency, turning a friendship with Illroots creator Mike Waxx into a relationship with T.I. and finagling a meeting with Kanye West out of networking with his engineer, Anthony Kilhoffer. The strength of his catalog is almost exclusively dependent on the strength of his connections.
Rodeo is the culmination of Travis Scott’s amassed networking efforts. The credits are a Who’s Who of the big names in rap and its neighboring genres: Narrated by T.I., it tells a nebulous tale of Scott’s meteoric rise and the perils of fame. The lush and often gorgeous production comes courtesy of current league leaders in rap hit-making Metro Boomin, Sonny Digital, and Zaytoven, with add-ons and attachments from a host of heavy hitters like Mike Dean, DJ Dahi, Hit-Boy, Wondagurl, Southside, FKi, and TM88. There’s standout work from Frank Dukes and Allen Ritter. Sometimes, like on "Oh My Dis Side" or "90210", beats jack-knife in two, revealing stunningly posh second acts. Sometimes, like on the nearly eight minute epic "3500", they have shimmering piano outros. The Pharrell-produced "Flying High" fastens a surging, slow-rolling coda onto a wailing beat. The sound is a kind of big-budget alt-trap with lots of accents and gloss, like if Future’s Dirty Sprite 2 was executive produced by 2010 Kanye, and it often pays big dividends.
Many of those dividends, though, feel as though they arrive in spite of Scott. He’s easily outmaneuvered by charismatic rappers of note Juicy J, Quavo, and 2 Chainz ("Crib bigger than your imagination"). Pop singers the Weeknd and Justin Bieber both steal the show with singsong rap-like verses on their respective features. Even Chief Keef and Toro Y Moi make their presences heavily felt, upstaging the Houston rapper in the process. Travis Scott’s verses are often without substance and chock full of choppy cadences, and songs without guests, especially "I Can Tell", are undone by the monotony.
To be fair, Scott isn’t without his merits. He is most effective when he harshly distorts his vocals to create texture, and in the company of others he can serve as a welcome change of pace. He has an ear for programming. But Rodeo’s best songs—"Maria I’m Drunk" and "Nightcrawler"—mostly succeed because they overcome his contributions. He's still a middling talent, and comes across as rebellious youngster that’s been given the keys to dad’s Porsche and simply asked not to wreck it.


Swift’s third album is her most unabashedly transitional work: between childhood and adulthood, innocence and understanding, country and pop.

Speak Now

After two hit records, Taylor Swift decided that her third would be longer and more personal, and she would write it entirely by herself, no co-writers. The songs would concern major events in her life, many of which occurred in the public eye. The lyrics would take the form of letters, direct addresses, one-on-one conversations where she always got the last word. She wanted to use her newfound wisdom to reflect on her parents, her dreams, and how it felt to stand on stage and notice a bigger crowd every night, shouting the words back at her. The working title was Enchanted, though she didn’t always feel that way. After 2008’s massively successful Fearless, Swift wrestled with her outsider persona and sudden celebrity, and the dissonance weighed heavily on her relationships. But she was learning fast.
Swift was 20 when the album, eventually titled Speak Now, came out and sold over a million copies in its first week—a record high in 2010. She had, and would continue to have, bigger hits, but these songs were breakthroughs in their own right. Co-produced by Nathan Chapman, the album is patiently sequenced; the average song length is just under five minutes, giving Swift enough time to pace her hooks—which had never been bigger—and her lyrics, which had never sounded more careful or wise. It’s an album focused on growing up, something she was learning would often be confusing, sad, and uncomfortable. It’s her most unabashedly transitional work: between adolescence and adulthood, innocence and understanding, country and pop. She was at a crossroads, and she was feeling lucky.
Swift had already become known for her intimate and intense relationship with fans. On these songs, she took a more authoritative role. There’s “Sparks Fly,” an early song that developed a big reputation after a live acoustic version circulated online. It appears here with all its fireworks and rain-soaked drama, a call to arms for people who’d been following since the beginning. There’s also “Never Grow Up,” a quiet acoustic ballad that draws the clearest line to her old material. Only now, Swift is wistful and sentimental, sounding far older than her years as she urges girls younger than her to savor every moment: “I just realized everything I have is someday gonna be gone,” she sings softly. It’s a heavy thought for a young songwriter, and the key word is just. As in, this is all happening right now, and if I don’t document it, it may disappear.
Here is where Taylor Swift found a lasting source of inspiration: the inevitable rise and fall of life and love, recast as emotional emergency. In the past, she had written sweet, airtight story-songs by turning the characters in her life into archetypes—nice guys, popular girls. Now she was dealing with a more complicated set of characters, so she adjusted her scale accordingly. “Dear John” and “The Story of Us” are likely about the same older musician. One is a crushing six-minute ballad about a famous guitarist emotionally manipulating a teenage songwriter. The other is a comic send-up of the night they ran into each other backstage at an awards show after the romance ended. The magic is how she wrings their hyperspecificity for universal truths—the older musician could be the sophomore jerk from the football team; the CMA Awards could be an after-school assembly. The message was clear: Swift was moving on, but she wasn’t leaving you behind.
And while it’s no great revelation that the mechanics of high school don’t end after graduation, Swift was not content to simply reapply old morals to new stories. So many of these songs rely on the tension of hindsight—a perspective she always longed for but never wielded quite so artfully. Hear how regretful and apologetic she sounds in “Back to December,” the increasing desperation in each chorus of “Last Kiss.” Even “Innocent,” her much-anticipated response to Kanye West stealing her mic at the 2009 VMAs, takes a nurturing approach as she guides her tormentor through his old ambitions and career highs, asking how close he is to the man he dreamed of becoming. (After all, she acknowledges, public adoration can be a fickle thing, and one day, it might be her wondering what went wrong.) She affirms in the chorus, “You’re still an innocent.” It’s a strange, writerly phrase that she must realize sounds phonetically identical to “You’re stealing innocence”—a particularly Swiftian way to accuse and forgive in the same breath.
On Speak Now, the way things sounded became just as important as what they meant. Swift was honing her skills as a pop songwriter, imagining a future where “country” was a biographical detail as opposed to an accurate descriptor of her music. Her arrangements were louder—an anxious string section tugging its collar through “Haunted,” a harmony-layered coda unfolding at the end of “Enchanted.” “Better Than Revenge” is a pop-punk bloodletting that owes its existence to Paramore, and it foreshadows the work to come: “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “Bad Blood.” Taking aim at a budding actress now dating her ex, it’s fascinating for how wildly Swift changes her perspective while maintaining focus: burning holes in her enemy’s eyes during the verses, pleading to her ex that “she’s not what you think” during each chorus, acknowledging the power and futility of her own response (“She thinks I’m psycho ’cause I like to rhyme her name with things”). You imagine her singing it, barging into a crowded room while everyone covers their mouth and avoids eye contact.
It’s the cathartic freakout during an otherwise elegant party, full of personal revelation. She has a moment of ecstasy in “Mine,” where she and a new love vow to “never make my parents’ mistakes,” which is precisely what you do at your first hint of independence and stability. In “Mean,” she puts her personal life on the back-burner to deal with the people antagonizing her professionally. Its lyrics are proud and snappy, as banjos pluck around her like sarcastic bluebirds on her shoulders. “One day I’ll be living in a big ol’ city,” she promises a man who tore her down in reviews. Does it actually hurt a critic to know that the artist will always be more powerful and rich? Probably not, but it’s not really for him anyway—Swift already got what she wanted. In “Ours,” a bonus track as good as any song she’s ever written, she sums it up with a smile that you can hear in her voice: “Don’t you worry your pretty little mind/People throw rocks at things that shine.” She knew she was approaching her supernova phase.
The ensuing tour was a blockbuster moment she had been preparing for. The intricate, explosive set design involved a full band, dancers, actors portraying the characters in her songs. There were fireworks, a massive bell she hurled herself at during “Haunted,” and a Shakespearean veranda that soared over the audience during “Love Story.” It was a little ridiculous. But for all the fans in attendance, this was how they always saw her: a superhero borne from their subconscious, someone larger than life and unafraid to look absurd. For the rest of the world, it was Swift’s reintroduction: Drop everything now—I have arrived. It’s the character she’d play for the rest of her career.
The concerts would begin with a recitation over the loudspeakers, a piece that also appears in the album’s liner notes. “Real life is a funny thing, you know,” it began. “There is a time for silence. There is a time for waiting your turn. But if you know how you feel, and you so clearly know what you need to say, you’ll know it.” It reads as inspirational but, in retrospect, it was also a warning: Things won’t stay the same forever. Life can be jarring, full of little interruptions. You won’t be prepared for everything. Near the end of the show, Swift introduced a heartland anthem called “Long Live,” tearfully confiding that it was written for all her fans, her whole band, and the team behind her. “It was the end of a decade,” she sings, “But the start of an age.” The young crowd roars, as if in anticipation.
This was all ahead of Swift as the album was nearing completion. Late in the process, she was out to lunch with mentor Scott Borchetta—among the first industry people to take notice of her in Nashville, offering a deal with his fledgling label Big Machine. By the end of the decade, he’d be just another on her long list of friends-turned-enemies. But for now, he was a confidant. She played him songs from the new record and discussed her plans for the rollout. She was excited. Borchetta was, too. But the working title didn’t seem right. Enchanted? He thought of princesses, fairytales, childhood. The old Taylor. This seemed different. Maybe she felt miffed by someone second-guessing her vision; maybe she was grateful to be challenged. After all, this music was precisely about these moments when your fantasies no longer apply to reality, when you have to grow up and make a choice and live with it on your own. She excused herself for a moment, and when she returned, she had a better idea.


Bill Callahan's second post-Smog album feels unusually intimate and contains some of the most varied arrangements of his career.

Bill Callahan: Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle

Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle

"I used to be darker/ Then I got lighter/ Then I got dark again." With these three simple lines from "Jim Cain", the opening track of his lovelorn new album, the always-succinct Bill Callahan sums up his tempestuous musical trajectory. For those of you keeping score at home, "darker" seems to refer to most of his output as Smog, when his songwriting often succumbed to the weary dread his dead-planet of a voice exudes like gravity. The lightening occurred over the course of A River Ain't Too Much to Love, his final record as Smog, and Woke on a Whaleheart, his first post-Smog effort. On these records, romantic gratitude gradually replaced romantic pessimism. Bill Callahan was happy; at peace. But it wasn't to last. The slumbering beast of love, "the lion walking down city streets," awoke, and it was pissed. He got dark again.
"I started telling the story/ Without knowing the end." And he's still doing so. Over the past two decades, Callahan's music has chronicled his unique, troubling insights about responsibility, faith, and love. The darkness that falls over Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle does not make it a Smog record-- it is an uncommonly gentle darkness that sounds light at first blush. Smog's malevolence seemed like a sweeping indictment of human nature, but here, Callahan's lyrics feel intensely personal. The record, an evident break-up affair, has such a strong air of private conversation that listening to it feels like eavesdropping; the second-person pronouns sail right past us to strike the target of the absent beloved. The reverent intimacy can become almost uncomfortable, as Callahan proffers up his words in the same way the devout handle rosaries.
Like Whaleheart, Eagle is kitted out with the instrumentation-- cellos and violins, French horns, pump organs, electric pianos-- that he embraced post-Smog. On Whaleheart, such embellishments were rangy and shambling; here they're loosely clenched, as if Callahan built the music to hold him together. Eagle addresses a specific-sounding lost love, but more broadly, it does what every Callahan record does: It takes a long hard look at who he is and what he believes at this moment. As a result, it finds him questioning the truths he discovered on Whaleheart, as when, on "Eid Ma Clack Shaw", he dreams the perfect song and scribbles it down in the middle of the night, discovering in his notebook the next morning the nonsense words of the song's title.
This self-portrait is so complex and subtle that it's tempting to skip discussing the actual music, which speaks so eloquently for itself. Some of the finest, most varied arrangements of Callahan's career are here. Wafting strings and contrapuntal soprano vocals render "Rococo Zephyr" as buoyant and lilting as its namesake. On "Eid Ma Clack Shaw", silvery electric guitar moves up and down staccato piano. "My Friend" and "All Thoughts are Prey to Some Beast" are almost like folk-Krautrock, with interlocked motifs billowing out over rigid pulses. Best of all is how the clenched arrangements open out into flowing, tender catharsis, and these are the moments you'll come to anticipate-- wait for the beatific chorus that bears Callahan's dense voice improbably high above the sinuous strains of "The Wind and the Dove", or the effervescent strings casting periodic surges of light through "Jim Cain".
Like the birds he loves so well, Callahan's albums find him alighting momentarily on precarious perches and naming what he sees. By the time we hear the music, he seems to have flown on again. His vantage from Eagle is one of textured ambivalence; his images split and shimmer like double-exposures, immediately releasing an obvious meaning quickly followed by a subtler one that equivocates the first. He's "still as a river could be," and a "child of linger on." He used to be "sort of blind," but now he can "sort of see." On "Faith/Void", he decides that it's time to "put God away," to no longer strive for his "peace in the light." Twenty years in, and Bill Callahan appears to be tearing up everything he's believed and starting from scratch, armed with the terrifying wisdom of knowing that one knows nothing, and searching for meaning regardless. He's resigned but heroically presses on. The void looms, but the music keeps it barely at bay.