Slidin'. Ramblin'. Driftin'. Movin'. Strugglin'. The War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel is all of these things on Slave Ambient, the Philly outfit's second full-length release. But they're the sort of band that believes the journey is more important than the destination.

Slave Ambient

Slidin'. Ramblin'. Driftin'. Movin'. Strugglin'. The War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel is all of these things on Slave Ambient, the Philly outfit's second full-length release. Given these professed feelings of restlessness and uneasiness, it's no surprise the band's hypno-roots-rock is all about forward motion and momentum, favoring steady, locomotive rhythms that rarely pause or waver-- elements that reinforce Granduciel's efforts to make his problems disappear in the rearview mirror.
Slave Ambient shares several qualities with its 2008 predecessor, Wagonwheel Blues: a sense of open-freeway abandon and splendid isolation set against a glorious expanse; an unabashed admiration for FM-radio Americana icons of yore (Springsteen, Dylan, Petty); and a willingness to buff the band's gritty edges with serene, if randomly deployed, instrumentals and reprises. In other words, the War on Drugs still deal in "excellent road trip music," as Pitchfork's Stephen Deusner described Wagonwheel Blues. However, this time Granduciel is less interested in documenting the environmental and economic travesties he sees unfolding outside his window as he is the internal dramas swirling around in his head. Nearly every song here expresses some desire to get outta town and start anew.
The band responds by amplifying the more textural qualities of their sound: dreamy synth drones, liquefied electric-guitar leads that linger and fade like raindrops rolling down the windshield, and the most tasteful use of smooth saxophone this side of Kaputt. (Interestingly enough, Slave Ambient was recorded without founding member Kurt Vile, who applies a similarly lysergic approach on his latest solo release, Smoke Ring For My Halo-- for fans of rustic rock'n'roll, the two albums collectively yield an embarrassment of riches not experienced since Wilco and Son Volt released A.M. and Trace in tandem.) When the band's wide-screened psychedelic flourishes are fused with Granduciel's well-worn Dylan- and Petty-isms, songs like "Brothers" and "It's Your Destiny" wondrously conjure nothing so much as the Traveling Wilburys recording for mid-1980s 4AD. Or in the case of the excitable "Baby Missiles" (a holdover from last year's stop-gap Future Weather EP), it's as if the Spiritualized and Springsteen albums filed alphabetically next to one another in your record collection had melted together on a hot August afternoon.
But as much as the War on Drugs make music to accompany an escape to something better, they're the sort of band that believes the journey is more important than the destination. The songs on Slave Ambient don't necessarily end in a place very different from where they began, but through subtle sonic manipulations and layering-- like in the last two minutes of opener "Best Night", where the guitars, piano, and melodica start to blur into the same blissful wavelength-- they give the impression that a great distance has been traveled. The really amazing thing about the album is how anthemic and affirming it feels despite the near total absence of proper sing-along choruses. Case in point, centerpiece track "Come to the City" is all about ascension, rising out of the miasmic haze of preceding interlude "The Animator" and gradually accruing all the confidence and verve of Live Aid-era U2. But rather than work up a chest-thumping, Bono-worthy wail, Granduciel is happy to sit back and ride out the song's dense waves of sound, to prolong the euphoric feeling of anticipation-- the road trip he's soundtracking is very much his own, and he's as much a slave to the ambience as we are.


After two releases mined from years of home recordings, Calgary songsmith Chad VanGaalen gathers a handful of songs recorded around the same time, in the same place, and unsurprisingly he finally attains a uniformity of sound and theme that can hold his gorgeously fractured songs together.

Soft Airplane

Sometimes we want the sounds of the city, sometimes we want the sounds of the country. Ours being a suburban republic, now and then we want both, and few musicians are better at this union of sensibility than Chad VanGaalen. The one-time busker from Calgary has a knack for summoning a virginal rural past with his picking and strumming, a dreamy patch of woodland, though he can also work up a mean batch of richly abrasive experiments that bear little relation to the pastoral.
Part of the charm of VanGaalen's past two records, 2005's Infiniheart and 2006's Skelliconnection, arose in their sense of looseness and disorder, which came through in the lyrics, the sequencing, and the textures. Both releases drew from an archive of home recordings; consistency would be tough to fake. But on his latest release, he gathers a handful of songs recorded around the same time, in the same place (his basement), with the same equipment ("primarily on an old tape machine and a JVC ghetto blaster," according to the press notes). Small wonder that, with Soft Airplane, VanGaalen finally attains a uniformity of sound and theme that can hold his gorgeously fractured songs together. Past the numberless instruments, styles, and guises, the solid form of Chad VanGaalen is now visible.

Neil Young meets Thurston Moore, an irresistible comparison to draw, does touch the heart of VanGaalen's aesthetic. The emotionally cracked falsetto, the nerdy forays into science fiction, the death-instinct, the longing, and the very metropolitan impatience with harmony and quiet are all there. We see this as we slip into "Molten Light", a murder ballad in the vein of Young's "Down by the River", as VanGaalen sings, "I dumped her body into the molten light/ It floated to the surface and it did not ignite." He shot his baby, but unlike Neil's gunman, he watches her rise out of the water to sort him out. Equally morose, bearing another final-resting-place title, "Willow Tree" describes death as liberating as he reflects on hangings and Viking funerals over a twanging banjo.

Which isn't to say that the ratty glimpse of the future, the glitch and crunch of his on-the-cheap production, is no longer there. He keeps the rainbow of precious instruments-- jury-rigged drum machine, analog synths, accordions-- only now the choices feel smarter, more attuned to each song's spirit. Fuzzed around the edges, thick with mood, the Thurston Moore-like "Bare Feet on Wet Griptape" whizzes by on its careening guitars and melodic hooks. Clearly VanGaalen wants to keep his grip on a pop sensibility, even if it's in the warped form of a no wave jam. With its curious pairings of harmonica and synthesizer, "Phantom Anthills" and "TMNT Mask" drift further away from the countryside, all the way onto the dancefloor-- or rather VanGaalen's skewed vision of a dancefloor.
These gestures toward a wider audience aren't free of VanGaalen's chronic morbidity. Where we do it in our thoughts, or on our anonymous blogs, this man thinks about death with his instruments. Now he's just going easier on the ears. We see this on the charismatic "Cries of the Dead", which artfully fleshes out the fixation on death that has marked all of his work, with the help of pop flourishes and patterns. In a matter of minutes, listeners are shuttled from the sight of a man beating his dog, to a memory of gazing upon a lover's painting of mountains and feeling like he was there. The song distills the essence of Soft Airplane, an intimate, intelligent, and always transporting cycle of songs that sends VanGaalen closer to his own voice and, in the process, closer to us.


Interweaving spiritual jazz, thumping rhythms, and contributions from a tight-knit group of collaborators, the Nicaraguan Canadian musician imbues his fifth LP with the warmth of human connection.

Coming and Going

A simple tenet guides Brandon Miguel Valdivia’s music as Mas Aya: “The more personal you can make music, the more interesting it is.” He does just that on his fifth album, Coming and Going. On “Be,” the Nicaraguan Canadian percussionist and producer passes the mic to his young daughter, Martina, and Valdivia’s partner and co-parent, Lido Pimienta, appears throughout the album—as she did on 2021’s Máscaras—softening Mas Aya’s twitchy, organically textured beatscapes to the point that they feel like the fruit of a family jam session.

Spending an afternoon with Valdivia and Pimienta sounds like it must be enchanting, considering the duo’s vast range of experiences, credits, and collaborations—from remixing Run the Jewels to starring on a children’s television show with Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Keeping busy throughout pandemic purgatory, Valdivia and Pimienta not only became parents, but moved from cosmopolitan Toronto to the comparatively suburban London, Ontario. Coming and Going was initially composed around field recordings that Valdivia collected at his parents’ house, drawing upon Buddhist spiritual practices to create a sense of tranquility within the frantic beats, like Arthur Russell after listening to Traxman.
Coming and Going boasts a patient, panoramic sound that embraces a lifetime of disparate cultures, communities, and influences. Valdivia welcomes house music’s pulse under spiritual jazz’s sprawling tent; the album gathers together a village of guest players, such as Afro-Cuban percussionist Reimundo Sosa, trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud, and Josh Cole on bowed bass. “Dora” and “Windless, Waveless,” the album’s bouncy opening songs, flash back to folktronica-era Four Tet and Caribou. “Ocarina” is anything but a reference to The Legend of Zelda, wrapping Rob Clutton’s luminous electric bass in rustling percussion and Rampersaud’s bright streaks of horn. Pumping pianos reminiscent of Mas Aya’s labelmate Scott Hardware echo throughout “What Shattering!” and the astonishing “No Trace,” an oasis of jazzy ambient bliss with vocals from fellow Toronto musician Isla Craig.
By the time he reaches closer “Abre Camino,” Valdivia has stretched all the way out, filling nearly seven minutes with shimmering synths, wooden flutes, and rhythms piled upon rhythms. Miraculously, these kinds of densely crisscrossed threads soothe instead of stress, drifting deeper into the ambient dimensions of Mas Aya’s music. On Máscaras, his music’s spiritual dimension masked political subtexts that were revealed in samples of street protests and revolutionary poets. This time, the personal is political. Alongside the warmly tactile sounds of the album’s innumerable interwoven instruments, the loving presence of the two primary people in Valdivia’s life, and an even larger chosen family of close collaborators, creates a human connection so strong you can feel it. One way of pushing back against injustice, he suggests, is simply existing in the here and now with your loved ones—an action so potent it needs no words to resonate.


Lana Del Rey's third album is her purest album-length expression, and her most artistic one. It is a dark work, darker even than Ultraviolence. While she's obviously a pop artist, Honeymoon feels as though it belongs to a larger canon of Southern California Gothic albums, and synthesizes ideas she's been vamping on from the beginning into a unified work.

Honeymoon

On the cover of Honeymoon, we see our star, Lana Del Rey, the idle passenger of a parked convertible Hollywood tourmobile, gazing behind her through face-obscuring shades. As an artist, she's never shied away from the obvious, but the image feels almost too on-the-nose, too apt—Lana doing The Full Lana. And yet, that's exactly what Honeymoon gives us—it is Lana Del Rey's purest album-length expression, and her most artistic one.
Accordingly, Honeymoon is a dark work, darker even than Ultraviolence, and the pall does not lift for its 60-plus minutes. It's an album about love, but "love", as Del Rey sings it, sounds like mourning. The romance here is closer to addiction—something that's sought for its ability to blot out the rest of life's miseries. On the title track, when she croons "Our honeymoon/ Say you want me too", she's dopily hopeful as Brian Wilson singing "We could be married/ And then we'll be happy." The album luxuriates in this bleak space between dream and reality, which stretches endlessly from one melancholy track to the next. It's not until "The Blackest Day", eleven songs in, that Honeymoon's static depression gives way to apocalyptic ecstasy, as she gasps "In all the wrong places/ Oh my God" in multi-tracked harmonies on the chorus. The moment is Honeymoon's emotional apex, but it still moves at the pace of a funeral march, and the release it depicts is that of embracing rock bottom.
The morose orchestral grandeur of the album feels like an arrival point, and also possibly a dead-end: the sentimentality and drama throws back to old Hollywood film scores. The setting is pitch-perfect and a million mothballed years away from the current pop landscape; it's strange, a barometer of youth culture trading in such old music. As a singer, Del Rey sounds more like the singer of her pre-Lana Lizzy Grant days here, when she was was performing torch songs in secretarial skirts at A&R showcases, looking too young to seem so haunted. Her previous two records felt like earnest stabs at finding a pop context for that voice, but they were both overwrought, and Honeymoon's arrangements feel built to rectify that.
Honeymoon acknowledges what, or rather who, we are here for. It knows that we want big, sad, fucked-up epics. It's rare to get to a chorus within the first minute, and until that point it's usually just Lana, maybe a little guitar or some cinematic strings. The programmed drums of "High by the Beach" and "Religion" wait nearly a minute to enter, and "Terrence Loves  You" is even sparser. Many tracks expand sleepily past the five- or six-minute mark, which is to say that Honeymoon's languor takes our attention for granted. Which is certainly not a mistake.
While she's obviously a pop artist, Honeymoon feels as though it belongs to a larger canon of Southern California Gothic albums—Celebrity Skin, Hotel California, The Hissing of Summer Lawns. She sings about it all—the sprawl, toxicity, the culture of transactional relationships, the particulars of the light ("God Knows I Tried")—with an East Coast blue-blood accent ("scared" becomes "skaaaahd"). All the gee-whiz irony of previous albums is gone, often she sounds like ABBA's Agnetha Fältskog roused from a nap, sweet but disconnected.
Like Joan Didion's ur-California girl transplant, Maria Wyeth, Del Rey sings like a woman who "knows what 'nothing' means"—on "High by the Beach", "Freak", and "Art Deco" she sounds beyond longing, like it's been a long time since she felt anything at all. She is cruelly incisive on "Art Deco" ("you're just born to be seen"), a highlight that curdles when the careless phrase "You're so ghetto" comes out in the chorus. It's one of the few tonal misfires on an album that otherwise feels like Del Rey moving into the temple she's built.
She has been transfixed by, and riffing on, America since the beginning, but Honeymoon pushes past easy Kennedy kitsch and undulating flags to mine something more specific. In the opening track, she sings "We could cruise/ To the blues/ Wilshire Boulevard," and the name check is shrewd. One of L.A.'s earliest thoroughfares, a locus of establishing the city's car culture, Wilshire runs sixteen miles, and as architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne writes, "can take you from a world-famous piece of architecture to a weed-choked lot, from a realized ambition to an abandoned one, in the space of a few blocks."
In the following verse, she replaces blues with "news" and substitutes "Pico Blvd.", which is working class for its duration, bi-secting Koreatown and running through Ecuadorian, Salvadoran, Russian, and Mexican communities. The juxtaposition is startling and canny. In the space of one lyric, she posits the invisible, real city running parallel to the gleaming, manufactured one, sketching an arterial map of a city coursing with ambition. It reminds us of something that was the very issue with Del Rey that irritated some early on—she knows exactly what she is doing. Honeymoon just synthesizes ideas she's been vamping on from the beginning into a unified work. She figured where she was going long before she got there; with Honeymoon she has finally arrived.


In contrast to his former Death From Above 1979 partner's MSTRKRFT project, Sebastien Grainger's debut solo effort ventures down a more conventional rock path with tracks built loosely on the singer-songwriter template.

Sebastien Grainger & the Mountains: Sebastien Grainger and the Mountains

Sebastien Grainger and the Mountains

When details of Death From Above 1979's breakup surfaced in 2005, it was surprising to learn of conflicts between Jesse Keeler and Sebastien Grainger, the band's only two members. The tight synchronicity of their rage-dance breakout You're a Woman, I'm a Machine-- released just a year before the split-- instead suggested that the look-alike duo shared a close creative companionship. In retrospect it seems like they probably didn't agree on an aesthetic, either. Keeler's post-DFA79 project MSTRKRFT abandoned rock for techno, shooting for (and whiffing on) a heavily vocodered brand of Daft Punk-inspired electro-house. Grainger's debut solo effort Sebastien Grainger and the Mountains, meanwhile, ventures down a more conventional rock path with tracks built loosely on the singer-songwriter template.
Of course, that term conjures unpleasant notions of watered-down Dylanisms (or worse), but Grainger isn't a neo-folkie (though signing to Saddle Creek might further the misconception). He's simply fleshed out his own song sketches with power-pop and, occasionally, 1970s arena rock to create a batch of high-energy, radio-friendly tunes. The record showcases Grainger's command of melody and works best at its most straightforward, like on album opener "Love Can Be So Mean". As with other standout moments here, the song leans heavily on the beefy power chords of Cheap Trick and an anthemic, new wave-inspired chorus. With its shouts of "Let's go out tonight!" the track could easily play beneath a high school flick's one-last-party sequence, and I mean that wholeheartedly as a compliment. "Who Do We Care For?" and "American Names" are equally catchy, the former recalling QOSTA's heavy-rock crowd pleaser "Go With the Flow" with its handclaps and insistent piano backing.
Had Grainger chosen to stick with this direction, Mountains would be perfectly listenable (if unoriginal), but unfortunately the album's strong lot ends with "American Names". On the bulk of the remaining songs, he shows an odd tendency for lopsidedness-- songs with capable choruses but plodding, asymmetrical verses. Make it through the inconsistent patches of "I Hate My Friends" and "By Cover of Night (Fire Fight)" and you'll be rewarded with sugary sweet, synth-flecked hooks and left feeling only half-satisfied. On these songs (and others such as "[I Am Like a] River" that suffer a similar fate), it feels like Grainger is going for a Pixies-esque verse/accessible refrain format, but this material-- uncomplicated and pop-reaching as it is-- doesn't call for it.
Mountains also trots out a handful of head-scratchers. Grainger includes a live version of "I'm All Rage", and while it's a good recording of a decent song, it protrudes oddly from the studio cuts surrounding it. There's a Jay Reatard-type punk thrasher called "Niagara" that is said to have been originally posted to MySpace after a night of heavy drinking and doesn't appear to have been improved upon since. Decisions like these make for an effort that, at times, comes across as slapdash and underthought. Which brings us full circle, in a strange way, to DFA79. While the band surely wasn't the headiest of its era, there was a svelte, muscular quality to their music-- a feeling that any excess had been cut away-- that is absent from this record (and, it's worth noting, Keeler's work in MSTRKRFT). What's also gone is the sense of aggression and urgency that made You're a Woman, I'm a Machine so impressive. Perhaps the same discord that did the group in was also its driving force; we'll never know. What does seem clear now, though, is that if Keeler and Grainger continue at their current pace, they won't soon escape the shadows of their former glory.


With his big legacy album Tha Carter V out of the way, Weezy is back in the booth and cruising, experimenting with an array of styles and a dizzying maze of wordplay.

Funeral

Lil Wayne has been rapping so long that the protégés of his protégés have protégés. A teen prodigy turned megastar turned cautionary tale turned comeback king, Wayne has led about as many lives as anyone in rap: From Best Rapper Alive to “flash without the fire” and back again. Now, at 37, free of the colossal stakes hanging over his oft-delayed legacy album, Tha Carter V, Wayne has settled in and rediscovered his looseness. An album title like Funeral had fans speculating that this one might be his last, a requiem for his career. That idea seems ridiculous now. Why would one of the great rappers of this millennium retire just as he’s returning to form?
Tha Carter V reestablished Lil Wayne as a force, answering many longstanding questions about his viability as an artist. Released at the conclusion of legal battles with his surrogate father and lifelong mentor Birdman, the album felt like the beginning of a second (or third) act. Wayne has said Carter albums are the only projects that require any specific preparation and focus, and that his other albums and mixtapes are simply born from his marathon recording sessions. With his rebound record finally liberated and the pressure alleviated, Funeral gets back to business as usual for Wayne. Which is to say: funneling what is likely countless hours in the booth spitballing and freestyling into something coherent.
Wayne’s down years were largely the product of a diminishing punchline-to-clunker ratio. He’s still a volume shooter, but like Rockets guard James Harden (who gets a song named after him here), his low-percentage play is offset by his high degree of difficulty, his ability to break the game with crafty maneuvers and extreme skill. On the Mannie Fresh-produced “Mahogany,” which warps lyric fragments from Eryn Allen Kane’s “Bass Song” into jazz scatting, Wayne bends in and out of shape around her interjections. His “Ball Hard” verse is a free-associative word game, bouncing from one character to the next until they begin to blur together. Listening to Wayne on Funeral is a bit like watching a skateboard trick compilation: He wipes out a few times but it’s always in service of some epic stunt and when he does land one, it can be awe-inspiring. Just take a look at this perfectly absurd sequence from the opener: “Drive-bys in a Winnebago/Snipers never hit a baby, crib, or cradle/Sit tomatoes on your head and split tomatoes/From a hundred feet away, now it’s a halo.”
There is a breakneck speed to many of these verses, as if Wayne is so anxious to keep rapping that he can’t wait to get into the next one. The songs where he stops to catch his breath and gather his thoughts tend to venture toward the vaguely introspective, considering isolation, distrust, and love, and they produce most of the album’s sleepier moments. On “Trust Nobody,” which leans into a flatlining Adam Levine hook about not even being able to trust oneself, Wayne sounds both bored and boring. Wayne, The-Dream, and Mike WiLL Made-It should be an ideal trio, but “Sights and Silencers” is an inert ballad with an ill-defined concept. Like most Wayne albums, it is longer than it needs to be and thus prone to dry spells.
For years, it has been easy to find trace amounts of Lil Wayne’s style from pop-rap’s center to well out along the weirder edges of the rap internet. The thought experiment “Dreams” is reminiscent of the best of Auto-Tune Wayne. “I Don’t Sleep” sounds like something Pi’erre Bourne might produce for Playboi Carti, the fluttering flutes and springy synths suiting Wayne’s half-sung cadences well. “Darkside” hedges closer to the sounds of SoundCloud gloomcasters like Trippie Redd, and he stalks through it with whiny tumbling phrases. Wayne mashes through every song with such reckless abandon it’s hard to tell where he draws influence these days.
But it doesn’t take long for a song to get jump-started, and when it does, it’s thrilling to hear him romp about. Wayne raps with a lightning ferocity that will often conceal his more direct revelations. Lyrics about longevity (“I had a Benz when you had a bike”) and his artistic slump (“Safe to say I lost my way but I never lost the lead/Safe to say I lost the brakes but I never lost the speed”) are snuck in behind cartoonishly vivid sequences (“She say I got a vanilla aftertaste/Cut his face, let him use his blood for his aftershave”). There is decidedly less storytelling on this record than Tha Carter V, but there is still plenty of clever and unpredictable writing. “I’m on Cloud 9, nigga, you just on iCloud/I’m a icon, I shine and burn your eyes out,” he raps on “Piano Trap.” Across the hour, Funeral sounds less like last rites for Wayne and more like a resurrection.


Every once in a while a record like this one appears out of the ether without clear reference points. Web ...

Thought for Food

Every once in a while a record like this one appears out of the ether without clear reference points. Web details on The Books are sketchy, but I have ascertained that they're a duo consisting of guitarist Nick Zammuto, who lives in North Carolina and has released some solo material under his surname, and cellist Paul de Jong, who lives in New York and has composed for dance, theater and film. After that, the pool of Books information dries up fast. The music is similarly unknowable, in the sense that it's difficult to classify. Musicians famously hate to be 'put into a box'; well, if more bands sounded quite as original as The Books, the practice would likely cease. If this record is the product of any sort of 'scene,' it's not one I've heard of. Thought for Food is going to sit comfortably in my collection in its own little category, a small world unto itself.
Despite Thought for Food's unique sound, the record, on one level, is not hard to pin down. The musical elements are so simple and commonplace that describing them is not a problem. What's difficult is conveying how these few everyday pieces are placed together so artfully to create something this striking and unique. I'll give that a shot later, but first-- what sort of music are we talking about here? Essentially, three different things go into nearly every Books song: there is always a guitar, usually acoustic; there is usually a stringed instrument, either cello or violin or both; and there are always sampled vocal fragments. That's basically it. Two tracks have a few bars of soft singing, while another, "Mikey Bass," has some bass work by a guy named Mikey. Sporadic percussion and a few other instruments are scattered here and there, but the guitar/strings/samples troika is the meat of The Books. These three instruments are recorded and then cut up and arranged via computer.
Sounds boring, you say? Think again. Somehow, The Books manage to turn these meager components into something touching, quirky and profound. The fact that vocal samples (which we can all agree have been done to death) sound new again here is nothing short of amazing. I'm not completely sure how they do it, though I know that the unusual amount of empty space in this record is part of it. While the rule of thumb for music with a collage approach has always been to stuff the samples into every nook and cranny, The Books let all the sounds breathe. In addition to the folky guitar, strings and the voice samples, silence is really the fourth primary instrument.
Another great thing about the record is the way the samples, though they at first seem random, manage to tell a story. "Read, Eat, Sleep" contains slow guitar plucking that alternates between two chords and some gentle, bell-like synth accents. Over the barely-there musical backing, voices spell out "r-e-a-d- e-a-t- s-l-e-e-p" as distant sound effects appear. As the track winds down, different voices start repeating various pronunciations of the word "aleatoric." Finally, the main voice, which sounds like it could be the host of a spelling bee, clarifies: "By digitizing thunder and traffic noises, Georgia was able to compose aleatoric music." Ah, yes, aleatoric, a word meaning composition by use of chance. As he speaks his final word, the last ring of the guitar fades out, and you realize that the sampled dialog had been describing the process of the track as it unfolded.
"Contempt" references the Jean-Luc Godard film of the same name. It contains a measured exchange between two men, with one asking the other the questions Brigitte Bardot asked her husband in the film: "What about my ankles, do you like them?" and "My thighs... do you think they're pretty?" Recontextualized here, the song takes on humorous overtones, as the men seem relaxed and speak slowly as if they're engaged in a job interview. The musical accompaniment to this dialog is a swaying waltz-time duet between plucked guitar and slightly screechy violin, and the tension that builds through the track is palpable.
"All Our Base Are Belong to Them" could be live, it's hard to tell. Someone is strumming a guitar and then a voice starts counting down from ten, "Space Oddity"-style. When he hits "one," a noisy chord is played and four of five people cheer. Instead of annoying, though, the background chatter sounds wonderful against the guitar and picked banjo, as the vocals (the only real singing on the album) sing something close to Pink Floyd's "Mother," sans-melodrama. It's warm and cozy wherever this is being recorded, even though something feels vaguely alien and unfamiliar.
A disturbing vocal exchange opens "Motherless Bastard," as a man speaking to a small child says, "You have no mother and father... they left, they went somewhere else." The tune that follows this sampled intro is a pretty folk strum, the melodicism of Fahey without the flash or technique. Indeed, if I had to name one clear forbearer for The Books, John Fahey would be it. The odd combination of folk guitar forms and aural collage seem at least tangentially related to his experiments. But the pleasure to be had from Thought for Food has nothing to do with musical referencing. This modest and unusual album stands on its own as a quiet triumph-- one unlike anything I've ever heard before.


The Philly rapper’s Eternal Atake victory lap feels like a collection of outtakes, but the high points are thrilling.

Eternal Atake (Deluxe) - LUV vs. The World 2

It would have been crazy to expect more of Lil Uzi Vert after Eternal Atake. Uzi’s long-awaited third album didn’t just deliver an hour of new music, it felt like the best possible record he could have made, a dizzying showcase for his technique, charisma, and style. And yet, one week later, he’s already returned with Eternal Atake (Deluxe)—LUV vs. The World 2, which gives us 14 new tracks and more than 40 additional minutes from the endless Atake sessions. Despite its length and billing as the sequel to Uzi’s breakout 2016 mixtape Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World, the album hews to the standard “deluxe edition” blueprint: This is a cobbled-together collection of B-sides—good ones, but B-sides nonetheless. In many cases, it’s clear why these songs didn’t make the cut.
That said, the high points are as thrilling as you’d expect from an artist who just hit his peak. LUV vs. The World 2’s crown jewel is “Bean (Kobe),” a Chief Keef collaboration that already enjoys legendary status in fan circles. The two rappers have been teasing the track on social media since 2017, and with good reason: the woozy song zeroes in on the sweet spot between Keef’s hard-charging flows and Uzi’s  impressionistic yelps. Over a Pi’erre Bourne instrumental whose smeared synths recall the producer’s work with Playboi Carti, the rappers stretch out: Uzi makes a Tony! Toni! Toné! joke while Keef uses the Swahili word for “blood.” The chorus is just Uzi breathlessly shouting the names of high-end Swiss watch brands over and over. It sounds incredible.
There are a few other songs on LUV vs. The World 2 that approach this level, even if they are lesser executions of Eternal Atake ideas. “Lotus” resembles a transmission from a distant planet thanks to an Oogie Mane beat that sounds programmed on a haunted Game Boy. Uzi flexes the exhilarating acrobatic flows of Atake’s first half on “Myron.” And on the bubbly-trap rave of “Got the Guap,” Young Thug and Uzi melt their voices  into a delightfully gooey mess (we also get to hear Thug rap, “I put a fish on the wrist”). Uzi has always been a chameleon, but hearing him go toe-to-toe with rap’s most flamboyant stylist underscores just how versatile he’s become.
Unfortunately, some of LUV vs. The World 2’s collaborations sounded better on paper. “Wassup” features a perfectly competent verse from Future in full HNDRXX crooner mode, but Uzi’s chorus feels unfinished and inert. Despite a surreal title and the combined efforts of Uzi, Young Thug, and Gunna, “Strawberry Peels” never gets off the ground. Uzi manages to elevate Nav’s soulless flexing on “Leaders,” but the song still feels like the result of Nav calling in a favor, not the other way around. The solo tracks that fill the record’s midsection—“Moon Relate,” “Come This Way”—feel half-baked.
Still, even when the songs don’t click, you can’t help but marvel at all the expensive materials littering the cutting-room floor. Most rappers would kill for these features, or these producers. But Lil Uzi Vert isn’t most rappers. Eternal Atake maintains its momentum with just a single feature and a set of instrumentals that were largely sourced from one production collective; It’s the rare hour-long record that feels like the product of focus and restraint. The songs here reveal the very different record that Atake could have been: a label-friendly, guest-filled grab bag that probably still would have done massive numbers on streaming. Even if it isn’t equal in quality to Eternal Atake, LUV vs. The World 2 speaks to the strength of Uzi’s vision all the same: sometimes, what you take out is as important as what you leave in.


Drake has gone from an unlikely rapper to an accepted rapper to maybe the biggest rapper out, all in four years, and he’s the genre’s biggest pop crossover star. His new album is a dimly lit affair, both morose and triumphant; as Drake albums go, this is the Drakiest.

Nothing Was the Same

“Really I think I like who I’m becoming,” Drake told us cautiously on his second album, Take Care. On its follow-up, Nothing Was the Same, he’s thought about it some more. “Prince Akeem, they throw flowers at my feet, nigga!” he screams. “I could go an hour on this beat, nigga!” The song, “Tuscan Leather,” which opens the record, is six full minutes long with no chorus, a point Drake is eager for us to absorb: “This is nothing for the radio/But they’ll still play it though/’Cause it’s the new Drizzy Drake, that’s just the way it go.”
The Drake Era has ended; welcome to the Drake Regime. Aubrey Graham’s gone from an unlikely rapper to an accepted rapper to maybe the biggest rapper out, all in four years, and he’s the genre’s biggest current pop crossover star. Kanye has, for the moment, stepped out of the pop-radio wars, which means that Drake currently has no meaningful competition. On Nothing Was the Same, he acts accordingly—the mansion doors swing shut behind you and he mostly stops pretending to be nice. “I’m on my worst behavior,” he leers, over a glowering low-end synth and an insectile battery of defaced-sounding percussion, courtesy of DJ Dahi. It’s the meanest-sounding thing Drake has rapped over, and he matches it with some of his angriest lyrics, a series of sputtered “muhfuckas never loved us” surrounding an extended riff on Mase’s verse on “Mo Money Mo Problems.”
As Drake albums go, this is the Drakiest: Except for Jay-Z, who shows up at the end of the album, Nothing Was the Same is an entirely solo affair, and all of Drake’s tendencies are dialed up. Even for a rapper known for sniping at non-famous girlfriends on record, he’s breathtakingly petty here: The album is four days old on the internet, and already his line, “The one that I needed was Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree/I’ve always been feeling like she was the piece to complete me,” from “From Time” is infamous, a reference so specific that the actual Courtney has had to put a padlock on her social-media life. Drake has been talking to old flames who have no equivalent soap box to climb on to talk back since before “CeCe’s Interlude,” of course, but as he’s gotten more famous, they’ve grown more malicious, and here they feel like a series of emotional drone strikes.
On “Paris Morton Music,” he relishes the thought of showing up at his high school reunion, watching everyone “go through security clearance,” and on “Too Much,” he airs out his family: “Money got my family going backwards/No dinners, no holidays, no nothing,"”he laments, before going in on his uncle, his cousins, and even his mother: “I hate the fact that my mom cooped up in the apartment, telling herself that she’s too sick to get dressed up and go do shit like that’s true shit.” Drake recently performed this song on Jimmy Fallon, apologizing briefly to his family before tearing into it. The album title, in context, reads like a self-fulfilling prophecy viewed from the rear view, an acknowledgment that he’s cutting final ties, torching the last bridges. He might like who he’s become, but you can hear he doesn’t expect anyone else to.
That’s OK: Loneliness, self-afflicted or otherwise, has always been Drake’s most reliable fuel. His albums draw strength from their insularity; when everyone outside them in mainstream rap was piling on epic minor-key horns and turning their songs into armored tanks, Drake drew the curtains. His sound was set apart more by what wasn’t there—snare claps, hi-hats—then what was. Nothing Was the Same is Drake and 40’s most audacious experiment yet in how far inward they can push their sound; a lot of the album sounds like a black hole of all 40’s previous productions being sucked into the center. Song-to-song transitions, which have always been melty and blurry, are more notional than ever. “Wu-Tang Forever” is a sunken glimmer of piano with a tiny tag of RZA’s voice, screaming “It’s Yourz,” before shading, at some point, into “Own It.”
There is no uncomplicated forward motion in Drake songs; usually one small element worms forward while everything sits around it, a haze of rhythmic and harmonic indecision. Drake continues his qualified, complicated claiming of Houston on Nothing, rapping “I was birthed there in my first year, man, I know that place like I come from it” on “Too Much.” But the only quality his music shares with Houston rap is its vague relationship to momentum. On “Started From the Bottom,” the bass isn’t even a settled pitch, but a buckling floor beneath the destabilized-sounding pianos, which scrabble down its side. “305 to My City” sits almost completely flat, a ticking snare the only indication of a pulse.
The only thing tumbling endlessly forward, of course, are Drake’s words, one emerging breathlessly after the other. He has never boasted many of the skills that define a technically skilled rapper, but he has cleared away any obstacles to his tangled thoughts in 40’s muted music and let his wordy lines climb up the walls like kudzu. To live in Drake’s music is to come away with his words smudged on you like newsprint ink. His eye-rollers and his stunners are all linked together, one long runaway train of sentiments: “I wanna take it deeper than money, pussy, vacation/And influence a generation that’s lacking in patience/I’ve been dealin’ with my dad, speaking of lack of patience/Just me and my old man, getting back to basics/We been talking about the future and time that we wasted/When he put that bottle down, girl, that nigga’s amazing,” he raps on “From Time.” It’s hard not to feel exhausted, slightly, after an album’s worth of these torrents.
You sense that Drake is exhausted, too. There is an intriguing whiff of third act rot hanging in the air on Nothing Was the Same, and because Drake is such a deft micro-manager of his own narrative, he’s drawing our attention to it, telegraphing it in his lyrics and dramatizing the sense that whatever he does after this album, it can’t quite be this again. He’s “somewhere between psychotic and iconic” on “Furthest Thing,” promising to “break everyone off before I break down.”
There are big, friendly singles as well—notably, the bar mitzvah floor-filler “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” which borrows its smoothly bumping glide from “Sexual Healing.” The song is terrific, one of Drake’s best pure pop songs ever and instantly a standard. It is also out of place on this dimly lit album, which is the most morose and triumphant of Drake’s career. “My life’s a completed checklist,” he boasts on “Tuscan Leather”—for Drake, it’s another reason to feel superior. But it’s also what you say right before you die, and I can’t imagine an admission more depressing.

Young Money Entertainment / Cash Money / Republic


In her breakthrough debut, a teenage Swift showed all the qualities that she would eventually use to conquer the world.

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift’s self-titled 2006 debut arrived at a fortuitous moment for young women in country music, particularly those with crossover ambitions. The beers-and-trucks bro-country grip of Florida Georgia Line and their ilk was a few years away from fully tightening; Carrie Underwood had won the 2005 season of American Idol; and the Dixie Chicks’ defiant “Not Ready to Make Nice” and Sugarland member Jennifer Nettles’ syrupy Bon Jovi duet “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” were making inroads into Top 40 radio. (The Chicks’ anti–George W. Bush stance had gotten them kicked out of country rotation.)
The 16-year-old Swift crash-landed into this landscape with “Tim McGraw,” a saudade-drenched mid-tempo ballad that’s as much a love letter to music’s power as it is to a soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend leaving for college. Swift’s quivering low soprano made the lyrical details—her “little black dress,” the stalled-out Chevy truck, “the moon like a spotlight on the lake”—hit harder, and showcased her ability to make diaristic songs universally relatable. You can track the song’s quiet hope (“When you think Tim McGraw/I hope you think my favorite song”) all the way to Reputation closer “New Year’s Day,” while its clear-eyed view of time’s passage is reflected in 1989’s “Clean.” “I love writing songs because I love preserving memories, like putting a picture frame around a feeling you once had,” she wrote in Elle earlier this year, and “McGraw” shows how essential that ideal has been to her work since the beginning.
Two years earlier, her family had left Wyomissing, Pennsylvania and moved to Nashville in support of their firstborn child’s teenage country-star dreams. Taylor Swift showed someone who had been honing her craft since her preteen years, meticulously turning her experiences with boys and with her girlfriends into country songs that reflected the lives of her peers, whom she connected with via MySpace. (“Every single one of the guys that I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans,” she told The New York Times in 2008.) MySpace would morph into Tumblr and Instagram Live, but the impulse would remain the same.
The album turned out to be a solid, spunky-yet-reflective country record told squarely from the teenage perspective, as opposed to the “can you believe someone so young sounds like that” packaging that weighed down former teen sensations like LeAnn Rimes. While Taylor Swift’s chief genre signifiers, like fiddles and vocal twang, are rooted in ’00s Nashville tropes, the influence of millennial teen pop bubbles up in the bouncy music and in ripped-from-the-LiveJournal lyrics like the cheerily insouciant chorus of “Our Song” (“Our song is the slamming screen door/Sneakin’ out late, tapping on your window”). “Picture to Burn” is a descendant of JoJo’s “Leave (Get Out),” given a Southern-fried twist by Swift’s drawled asides (“alla yer best freeends”), her mockery of the dude’s “stupid old pickup truck you never let me drive,” and the plunking banjo. (“Picture to Burn” also showed that she was learning to hone her poison pen: In the original version’s first verse, she threatened to tell her friends the guy who’d wronged her was gay, a line she dropped from live performances shortly after Taylor Swift’s release. The album version followed suit.)
“Teardrops on My Guitar,” a longing ballad about an out-of-reach crush, presaged Swift’s eventual embrace of pop; in early 2008, her now-former label Big Machine released a “pop version” that added echo to her voice and a mid-tempo beat, dropping the weepy slide guitar that doubled as a realization of the song’s title. While Swift was hardly alone in reworking country songs for the “hits you can play at work” crowd, the ease with which “Teardrops” translated to straight pop showed that her deft melodic touch and conversational way with deeply felt emotions could scale to the widest possible audience. Today, her production takes its cue from current trends, and her subjects don’t need to be identified via online fishing expeditions, but her detailed lyrics and canny worldview were there from the start.
Back then, though, she had doubters. An Associated Press report on her early success opened with sneering from a Nashville bigwig: “Tell her to get back in school and come back and see me when she’s 18, and bring her parents,” manager and promoter Jerry Bentley scoffed. That his biggest client was Lee Greenwood, the man behind the hoary “God Bless the U.S.A.,” is almost too delicious; that the piece quoting him found his dismissals worthy of the story’s opening lines is depressing. But Swift showed—and her songs’ subjects learned over and over again—that she’d always get the last word.


On a stirring full-band album, the classically trained harpist lets her instrument become an integral part of her twangy, easygoing rock’n’roll sound.

And Southern Star

From Alice Coltrane to Joanna Newsom to Mary Lattimore, a rich lineage of artists have sought to liberate the harp from its familiar roles in the symphony and the church. In the worlds of jazz, ambient, classical, and even electronic music, the instrument is enjoying a prolonged renaissance. But it’s still rarely heard in a rock-band context. Both impractically large and delicate in timbre, the 90-odd pound instrument tends to be spotlit and showcased—not made to wrestle with guitars and drums. On Mikaela Davis’ latest album, And Southern Star, the Hudson Valley-based songwriter and bandleader embarks on her most stirring experiments yet in blending the soft tones of the harp into a fully realized rock sound.
And Southern Star emphasizes its full-band approach in every aspect, including the title. Southern Star is the name of the ensemble—comprising drummer Alex Coté, guitarist Cian McCarthy, bassist Shane McCarthy, and pedal steel player Kurt Johnson—that has backed Davis onstage for a decade. And Southern Star marks their first time appearing on a record with her, and their years of symbiosis come through in the easy chemistry of these arrangements. Davis and the band work through passages of rugged alt-country, twangy roots rock, paisley-bedecked Laurel Canyon psychedelia, and jam-band choogle, always staying anchored in the interplay between the stringed instruments.
The relationship between Davis’s harp and Johnson’s steel guitar is particularly fascinating. It’s a thrill to hear these instruments—one from the chapel, one from the honky-tonk—weave in and out of one another’s paths, occasionally meeting in harmony. Country music isn’t the sole focal point of And Southern Star, but it’s where the album shines. “Home in the Country” is breezy and pastoral, with Davis and Johnson trading lead melodies over a strummed acoustic pattern. (A disintegrating vocal effect in its back half is a pleasant surprise, and one of the album’s few distinctly modern touches.) “Saturday Morning” dials into the same languorous, cosmic frequency as the Flying Burrito Brothers, while “Don’t Stop Now” nods to the sun-soaked country-rock of Sheryl Crow.
Davis’ harp gives the album a textural signature, but it’s her pliant, deceptively sturdy vocals that give the songs their shape. Like Crow, she manages to find emotional profundity while sounding monumentally unbothered. Even when she’s singing about the sting of faded love, as she does on highlights like “Far From You” and “Promise,” she sounds like she’s dispensing wisdom from a beach chair. Her easygoing delivery nearly obfuscates the strange configuration of And Southern Star, a contrast that feels deliberate. The harp hasn’t found much mainstream success as a lead instrument, but these warm, inviting songs make it feel possible. On And Southern Star, Davis and her bandmates make a daring choice of instrumentation that becomes an intuitive, integral part of their rock’n’roll.


Marking his return as Oval after a 10-year absence, glitch pioneer Markus Popp issues a sharp, prickly, and finely detailed EP.

Oh EP

If you weren't following the more abstract/IDM end of electronic music between the middle of the 1990s and early 2000s, you can be forgiven for only having a hazy idea of what Markus Popp's Oval project was all about. You might have heard that his music involved digital glitches, or that he remixed Tortoise a couple of times, or that he had a side project with Jan St. Werner from Mouse on Mars. The last proper Oval release, Ovalcommers, came out in 2001, so we're talking almost 10 years since he put out anything new under the name. Those making experimental music heavily dependant on software are taking a real risk when they decide to sit a decade out. Things change fast, and people forget.
How much you know and care about the records Oval released between 1993's Wohnton and Ovalcommers will probably have something to do with what you get out of his very different new EP, Oh. Though in truth, the project always seemed to be in a state of perpetual transition. In Oval's early years, Popp worked with Frank Metzger and designer Sebastian Oschatz to make hypnotic and highly textured tracks that often featured a rhythmic pulse that sounded like a skipping CD. Following the departure of Oschatz and Metzger after the gorgeous ambient masterpiece 94 Diskont, Oval's music grew increasingly dense and harsh, to the point where it moved freely between placid sounds and flat-out noise. While there was an overriding Oval aesthetic centered around the sonic beauty of digital disruption (Popp's ideas were central to many conversations about electronic music during the time), the specific qualities of the records varied. And that's important to keep in mind when approaching Oh, because this record sounds almost nothing like the Oval we once knew.
Where Oval once felt huge and immersive, Oh is sharp, prickly, and finely detailed. The central sonic motif in most of these minatures-- 15 tracks zoom by in 25 minutes-- is what sounds like samples of guitar strings plucked between the bridge and the tuning pegs. Which is to say that these sounds are high-pitched and metallic with virtually no resonance, though they are digitally looped and stretched and warped when they're not bouncing between the speakers. The recording environment is very dry, which is interesting, because Popp is for the first time working with the sounds of "real" instruments, including a drum kit that pops up regularly. Though these are virtual instruments arranged by Popp electronically, they're used in a way that suggests a band with a post-rock bent playing in a room together-- the cymbals splash and the kick drum kicks and the guitar bits buzz and repeat and you get the sense of a trio searching for the spaces that exist in between genres. It sounds a bit like improv, a bit like instrumental rock, and a bit like turn-of-the-millennium IDM, even as it never really sounds like Oval.
With all of its pings and scrapes in the middle and upper part of the sonic spectrum, Oh can be a difficult listen on headphones. In a room, though, the EP opens up, and the logic of Popp's approach becomes more apparent. One thing this music shares with earlier Oval is the sense that it seems just on the verge of falling apart. There's a nice tension here as randomness-- mostly embodied by the frenzied guitar samples-- struggles with order.
It's good to have Oval back, and there's something to be said for re-thinking one's art from the ground up. But there's also a nagging sense here that it's all been done before. Popp's "virtual band" moves are reminiscent of Jan Jelinek's likeminded experiments in the early part of the 00s, and the focus on clicky guitar samples is close to the work of the California-based artist Christopher Willits from around the same time. Of course, all of these artists are obscure in the grand scheme of things, so the fact that this sound has been touched on before shouldn't matter to most. Popp has broken more than his share of ground, and now it's time to try something else.


R&B singer/producer theMIND’s debut project Summer Camp is a low-stakes surprise, the late-night stoner’s LP we didn’t know we needed.

Summer Camp

TheMIND (real name Zarif Wilder) bides his time floating between two Chicago worlds: He has backing vocals on Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book and appeared on SaveMoney Crew affiliate’s projects like Joey Purp’s excellent iiiDrops and Noname’s Telefone, and Chance-compatriots Donnie Trumpet and Knox Fortune make appearances on his debut project Summer Camp, which snuck out into the world last June. But he made a name for himself before that, as a member of production collective THEMpeople, producing songs for Mick Jenkins and guesting on his albums (along with other auxiliary members of this scene, Sean Deaux and Saba). It’s an easy-but-accurate comparison to place theMIND in this world: maybe it’s the tone of his voice more than his lyrical content, but he’s this scene’s Frank Ocean.
Summer Camp isn’t Nostalgia, Ultra, though, even though I think it aspires to be, with its vaguely conceptual narrative (songs that play in a car as a couple vacillate between talking and arguing) and snippets of tracks that filter in and out of focus like a dream (or a channel surfer). But its biggest strengths lie elsewhere—theMIND is a gifted producer, and the way he’s constructed this record is less like some alt-R&B throwaway mixtape and more like a cavernous, meandering album.
A whistling tea kettle sets things off on opener “Summer Camp” before the song finds the album’s cushiest groove. A headphone-friendly nocturnal mood, consuming the album like embers around a campfire, is established: “Run through the woods if the rain comes/cover your head ’til the pain numbs/lose it all in the earth, leave your tears in the dirt/fall in love ’til it hurts/we young,” works the same wistful, doomed-young-romance lane Ocean has trafficked in since 2011 (if not recently). It’s not the most subtle stuff, but the pleasures of Summer Camp reside in Wilder’s ability to conjure a mood with his production, then sell the emotion with the most direct line of songwriting.
“Pale Rose” is the single, and it’s less effective, a propulsive, “I Would Die 4 U”-type beat that suffers from a generic, overwrought bridge: “Hey you/right over there/who even loves/who even cares?” It’s the growing pains of a songwriter still trying to reach his final form. On the brisk “In Peace,” an introspective, neo-soul-esque production that would slot nicely onto Jamila Woods’ HEAVN, Wilder hits his deepest nerve: “My granny told me read my Bible/as I start to daydream/I see it all in HD/we’re bigger than they told us we were.” On the Noname-assisted “Only the Beginning,” he adopts a husky, sing-song Isaiah Rashad flow: “I often sweat when haunted nightly by regret like/why I didn’t kill that nigga when my sister told me what he did to her?” He rambles a bit more about his sister, but never hits the detail of what happened to her—he’s yet to develop a songwriter’s storytelling instinct, but he’s attempting to tap into that vein.
Wilder’s gift is to summon some of the magic of guys like Ocean, Rashad, and Chance, but it’s also a curse, because you can more easily chart out how much more maturing he has to do before he can hang with them. All said, Summer Camp is one of the summer’s few surprises, a low-stakes album available for free, the late night stoner’s LP we didn’t know we needed. If you like Mick Jenkins but wished his songs were a little lighter, or if you want to hear an earnest young Chicago artist find his voice without literally sounding like Chance, theMIND’s Summer Camp is a pleasant place to stop in.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified theMIND as a member of Chance the Rapper’s SaveMoney Crew. It has been amended.


On Darkness and Light, John Legend pushes beyond his comfort zone for something a bit more ambitious.  This is a love record about navigating the bleak world and finding happiness in dark times.

Darkness and Light

John Legend doesn’t waste time getting to the point of Darkness and Light, his fifth solo album. On “I Know Better,” the record’s gospel-infused opener, the singer refutes the celebrity he’s acquired to date: “Legend is just a name, I know better than to be so proud/I won’t drink in all this fame/Or take more love than I’m allowed.” At this stage of his career—which includes 10 Grammy awards, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award for Best Original Song—Legend could’ve continued to play it safe; his mix of secular and spiritual soul has taken him far over the years. But on Darkness and Light, Legend pushes beyond his comfort zone for something a bit more ambitious.
With its meditative and ingratiating songwriting, this is unmistakably a John Legend album, yet there’s a renewed sense of peace and even a sad wisdom that distinguishes it. He sings lovingly of his infant daughter, Luna, wondering who she will become as she grows older. He ponders the different sides of love, and the raw emotions they evoke. He's made a love record about navigating the bleak world and finding happiness in dark times.
For Darkness and Light, Legend reached out to Blake Mills after hearing what the producer did for Alabama Shakes’ breakout LP, Sound & Color. In turn, Mills wanted to push Legend to the limits of his emotional range. “There was this hole in John’s material that I felt like a huge part of his personality could come through,” Mills recently told Billboard. “We’re still talking about ‘What’s Going On’ some 40 years later. Yes, ‘Sexual Healing’ is a great track. But when we think of Marvin Gaye, ‘What’s Going On’ is the song that comes up.” The implicit criticism there rings true: Legend has calling-card songs like “Ordinary People” and “All of Me,” yet by and large, he makes safe R&B that doesn’t resonate long-term or hit hard politically (he released a collaborative LP with the Roots in 2010, but those were covers of Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, and Bill Withers.)
For Darkness and Light, Mills wanted to merge Legend’s artistic and political sides, bringing the opinionated guy we see on “Real Time With Bill Maher” to the forefront. We hear shades of this on “Penthouse Floor,” a standout featuring Chance the Rapper, even if the grooving track behind Legend still feels more sultry than angry as he wonders: “All this trouble in this here town/All this shit going down/When will they focus on this?/Streets fired up with the TV crews/Look, Ma, we on the news!/But they didn’t notice before this.”
Conversely, on the Miguel-featured “Overload,” Legend reflects on his marriage to model Chrissy Teigen, running down the endless distractions posed by the shiny device in his hand as a metaphor for connection (“Let that cell phone ring/Let that blue bird sing/Let that message say ‘unread.’”) The album comes full circle near the end, on “How Can I Blame You,” in which Legend is pulled over for a traffic violation—but instead of a menacing encounter, or a meditation on the rash of police shootings of black men during traffic stops, Legend uses the moment as a metaphor for life’s rapid pace. He’s urged to slow down and appreciate what he has. In the end, Darkness and Light isn’t the political feat Mills and Legend had hoped for, but it’s a step forward in the singer’s evolution. He may never be a firebrand, but Legend proves there’s still strength in humility.


At once telegenic and slightly tongue in cheek, the Montreal composer’s ersatz chamber music is proof that you can love something and poke fun at it at the same time.

Leviathan

Imagine this: you’re watching an actor in his mid-fifties playing a politician—a tall white guy with a good head of hair and a crisp blue suit, who greets his adoring public after a successful rally. Think a very special episode of Scandal. People cheer, they wave signs of support. Our great nation beholds its benevolent leader. And then, entering from the side of the screen comes a scary freak dressed in dark clothes. He has a gun! Pop, pop, pop. Screams, commotion. As the camera pans out to take in the bedlam, the music enters, just as you expect. An orchestral piece scaled down to computer size, its patriotic flattening uncanny. This is the music of a real crisis in a fake nation. Will our country survive? That is the question being urgently asked by d’Eon’s imagined score. On “The President Has Been Shot,” the song with the most appropriate title of all time, the oboes are distressed, the cellos are deeply upset, and the violins pump fast enough to match the speed of our racing hearts.
Though Montreal producer Chris d’Eon always leaned toward a telegenic brand of miniaturized chamber music, at first it seemed like that predilection was an accent, not the focus itself. On 2011’s Darkbloom, a split LP with then-fellow underground Canadian producer Grimes, his sacramental trilling was blended with an instrument largely absent from his new music: drums. The use of percussion, largely owing to various forms of Chicago dance music, from house to footwork, was the least interesting part of the music, but the most prominent. Dropping the propulsion to focus on warped melodies has created a new lane, one in between the avant-garde and the heavenly, the classical and the canned. In the past decade, he’s released several volumes of fairly straight-ahead liturgical music via his Music for Keyboards series, though in the context of his much more fulsome new album Leviathan, those records seem more like a dare to see if he could do it, a mastering of mimicry along the way to truly finding his own goofier voice.
Much of the music on his new album, like “The President Has Been Shot,” is dramatic, but, importantly, self-knowing. Yes, you can love a thing and make fun of it at the same time. This is music that sits somewhere between religious and hold music, where purgatory is both subject and experience. Two other tracks, in addition to “The President,” describe an action: “Climbing the Overhang” and “Installation of the Cisterns.” The former takes a playful approach with bloopy ’80s digi-funk synths, like climbing an overhang is an accomplishment that might have happened on The Jeffersons. The latter, with digital zither and bells giving the track a MIDI-gamelan feel, is ceremonial but a little sinister. These cisterns might end up as a part of a zany plot in Oceans 14.
Elsewhere on Leviathan, d’Eon tackles, with less success, aughts-era radio R&B, the type of thing Polow Da Don or Jim Johnson trafficked in. It’s not that d’Eon doesn’t create a perfectly fine beat that Christina Milian would have gladly used, it’s that those songs, like “Heat Wave” and “Figurine”—which feels a little too indebted to the beat for TLC’s “No Scrubs” and Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine”—don’t add much to a template that was well worn a decade ago.
Leaving the immediate world of references, onscreen or otherwise, my favorite song on Leviathan is “Rhododendron pt. IV,” which shreds every one of d’Eon’s influences into a sunshiny tune. It’s a silly song, the bold and repeated organ giving way to the synthesizer woodwinds. It feels fun, curious, invigorating. It has echoes of early music’s pump-organ rigor, but it’s more whimsical than wallowing. It’s religious music if your pastor was the Rock. If d’Eon invites you to church some Sunday, you should probably go.


The pop star offers his ambitious, grandiose sophomore album: Almost entirely produced by Timbaland-- and with a more pronounced hip-hop edge than its predecessor-- the album abandons the feelgood sheen which the Neptunes peddled so adroitly on his debut, Justified, but makes up for it with the largesse of its sonic embrace.

Justin Timberlake: FutureSex / LoveSounds

FutureSex / LoveSounds

How Justin Timberlake must have sweated and strained over following his debut, Justified: As an album it was merely good, but it was graced by four singles so monumental they made him one of the decade's most celebrated pop icons. According to the laws of momentum which govern pop music, any sequel could only be either be a pale reflection or a hubristic monstrosity. With FutureSex/LoveSounds he unrepentantly chooses the latter.
If Justified was openly modelled on Off the Wall, FutureSex/LoveSounds' affectations are more panoramic: In reductive terms, it's the logical Thriller-style follow-up, steelier and sexier and more neurotic than its predecessor, but generally the album is more reminiscent of Prince-- not only the polished funk-pop of Purple Rain, but also the grandiose excess of Prince's last 20 years. Nothing is necessarily gained (and often much is lost) when pop music attires itself in notions of artistry and ambition, but with Justin it is, perversely, what makes him such a good pop star: As with Christina Aguilera, towering self-belief and stylistic metamorphoses provide a spectacle which papers over his stumbles and adds lustre to his successes.
Almost entirely produced by Timbaland-- and with a more pronounced hip-hop edge than its predecessor-- the album abandons the feelgood sheen which the Neptunes peddled so adroitly on Justified, but makes up for it with the largesse of its sonic embrace, with Timbaland resurrecting many of his most effective guises, from rubbery synthetic funk to pseudo-crunk blare to eerie Eastern opulence. Throughout, the grooves are defined by their melodic intensity: It's the searing synth riffs and skyscraping strings which grab your attention, not stuttering beats or startling sound effects-- although these, too, are present in abundance.
Here, Timberlake magnifies the persona he adopted on his debut, somehow both consummate lover and desperately needy. On hyperactive second single "My Love" his sexual propositions constantly elide into a proposal, as if anything less than matrimony is barely worth contemplating. Likewise, the suavely portentous title track-- poised between the carnal strut of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" (well, its verses) and the masochistic flutter of the Junior Boys-- derives its charm from its lofty aspirations, like a familiar lover staging an elaborately exaggerated seduction. It is this excess of ambition over achievement, as opposed to any real consistency, which makes FutureSex/LoveSounds more of an album than Justified was. Songs which sound puzzlingly self-indulgent in isolation-- most obviously, the smirking, tenuously tuneful first single "SexyBack"-- are cloaked in a compelling intensity and purposefulness when played in succession.
Most brilliantly, the tight, clipped disco-funk of "LoveStoned" descends precipitously into the gorgeous melancholy of "I Think That She Knows", all MOR-rock guitar churn and weightless strings, the same chorus ("She's got me love stoned…and I think that she knows") transformed from infatuation to the paranoid and elegiac admission of an addict. This unselfconscious (or, rather, hyper-selfconscious) revelling in melodramatic gestures is among the album's attractions; even the handful of glutinous ballads are admirable for their lack of restraint or proportion-- in particular, the gospel-tinged morality tale "Losing My Way", graced by utterly cringeworthy lyrics, is somehow both a colossal disaster and deeply lovable. Such missteps are few, but also a necessary piece of this album's puzzle: By courting disaster so fearlessly, Timberlake's reach makes his music attractive-- even when it exceeds his grasp.


PC Music Volume 1 compresses two years of A. G. Cook's London-based label into a half hour. Taken together, it delineates the PC Music aesthetic: airbrushed articulations of digital life in all its silly, beautiful, desperate triviality, escapism whose primary effect is to remind us of what we’re trying to escape.

PC Music Volume 1

PC Music Volume 1 is anti-physical music for an anti-physical time. Like everything that A. G. Cook’s London-based label’s released since 2013, these 10 songs are invocations of the hyperreal, created to meet the anxieties of an age where bodies are rarely written about as sites of joy or authenticity, and more frequently discussed as zones of inequity, violence, embarrassment and pain. The desire to exist as a well-tended garden of pixels fuels many of our culture’s dominant systems: the databases of altered thoughts, distorted images, the avatars that demonstrate reaction or stand in for action. Like all of these networks and products, PC Music answers our desire to escape the burden of physical presence—and in the process ends up sharpening and perpetuating the desire even further.
Both a label and a self-contained genre, PC Music is constructed from deep abstractions of pop and experimental electronic music; its building blocks are the musical equivalent of emoji, symbols that replace words that replace voices. It’s an airbrushed articulation of digital life in all its silly, beautiful, desperate triviality; it has an avant-garde surface but is reactionary in its bones. Sonically, it’s a response to today’s alarmingly easy production glosses, the intense plurality of sub-subgenres that flourish online. If pop’s basic work is to grab you by the heart, PC Music flips and disses that aim completely. The label’s sound resembles what aliens would produce if they sunk a jukebox in acid and then tried, from the randomized wreckage, to communicate some version of love. Instead of affection, they’ll give you a heart-shaped simulacrum—and maybe, as suggests PC Music, that’s what you wanted after all. When physical presence is a source of so much complication, sometimes an abstraction is the only thing a person can bear.
A test of the boundaries, possibilities and limitations of this ultra-focused aesthetic, PC Music Volume 1 compresses two years of work into a half-hour. Taken together, the rapturous, nightmarish cartoon corpus is maddeningly effective; it solidifies PC Music’s ability to only produce strong reactions, whether starry-eyed captivation or powerful revulsion or a nauseating juxtaposition of both poles. There’s a meaningful spectrum of approaches within the PC Music ethos—classical composer Danny L Harle’s "In My Dreams" has a heartbreakingly soft, sweet, harmonic gravity, while A. G. Cook’s alter ego Lipgloss Twins’ "Wannabe" is a chopped-up, anti-melodic spatter of brand names and robot garble—but there’s a relentless logical consistency to the sound. Every track feels almost auto-generated, scrambled, which makes the human precision in each arrangement even more eerie: PC Music sounds chaotic but is sneakily minimalist, deliberate to the last distorted note.
The calculation behind this effect is a large part of what makes it monstrous: it’s the sound of whimsy without spontaneity, lightness without joy, longing without knowledge, aggression with no object. It’s a dollhouse universe, for female voices and female figures only. The male producers and artists are controllingly invisible in PC Music, and it’s hard to say whether that’s a real aesthetic constraint or a deliberate large-scale perpetuation of the idea of women as powerless, squeaky, sweet. The genre, anyway, has been slapped with labels of "gender appropriation," and the sound does feel awkwardly, distinctly male sometimes, in its "South Park"-ish warehouse artlessness. But, if anyone’s really in drag here, it’s humans pretending to be avatars—the total elision of soul.
Like a Kardashian, PC Music cannot be insulted by the word "contrived." PC Music is deeply contrived; it’s fake as hell, that’s the point, that’s the entire energy. But this ethos, of course, has its limits. PC Music only works when its theoretical intention lines up with its physical effect: when you listen to it and become instantly depersonalized, blissfully and bubbly, more pixel than flesh. The best route to this end naturally centers on pleasure. In Volume 1, the pastel jelly-bean melodies and baby-girl anime coos of Hannah Diamond’s "Every Night" and A. G. Cook’s "Beautiful" reach this synthetic liftoff; the two pair up again for "Keri Baby", a maniacally playful track with a stormy bassline, a bubble noise vamping, a refrain of "Give it to the girl/ Give it to the girl/ Give it to the cutest girl." The closing track, easyFun’s "Laplander", is transcendent: all simulated mechanical longing, synth squeaks and stilted voices reaching for ecstasy. In tracks that are less joyful—GFOTY’s "Don’t Wanna / Let’s Do It", for example—the self-perpetuating darkness and denial that PC Music draws on gets a little too clear for comfort.
PC Music is escapism whose primary effect is to remind us of what we’re trying to escape. We can’t trade body for avatar; we can’t displace longing forever. But for the space of an album—the sheer forcefulness of this intention smashed into a dizzy half-hour span—the sincerity within our most fundamentally artificial impulses comes calling. You wish you didn’t live in a world that produced PC Music, but you do—and because you do, thank the god in the machine for PC Music. It’ll come whispering and screaming in an absolute vacuum; it’s a party reconstituted long after anyone’s been there to laugh. It’s empty, and yet somehow the stakes are monumental. Can you chip your way to the real through this pixelated thicket? Well, you can, and worse, you have to.


Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross follow their award-winning score to David Fincher's The Social Network with this bleak three-hour The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack, a sprawling mass that exceeds the length of the film it was meant for.

Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo OST

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo OST

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' score for The Social Network was brilliant because it worked as a conventional film score even though its approach was boldly unconventional. The pair assembled a dense but brittle map of drones, foreboding sound effects, and delicate melodies, submerging acoustic sounds in pools of digital filters. The result was something suited to filmmaker David Fincher's work-- brooding, mysterious, and tinged with anxiety. The film world agreed: Reznor's first foray into soundtrack work after putting Nine Inch Nails on hiatus landed him both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. Who knew? Fincher clearly has confidence in their abilities, as he tapped Reznor and Ross once again to score his latest movie, the film adaption of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. With the team earning another Golden Globe nomination, it would seem like they're doing something right.
Dragon Tattoo doesn't differ drastically from Social Network but it's not a retread. For starters, this one's a three-hour beast, spread out over three CDs, six vinyl LPs, or a whopping 39 digital files. So while The Social Network could be received as a digestible standalone product, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo doesn't offer the same sort of flexibility. That's in part by design as much as structure: Where The Social Network had discernible motifs like "Hand Covers Bruise" and pseudo-techno like "In Motion", the music here is more obtuse, focused on building tension and defining space rather than conveying feeling or emotion through melody. Which means there are few standout tracks; instead, the most arresting moments emerge out of layers of increasingly damaged sounds that set an uncompromisingly bleak mood.
The score's overcast outlook is well suited to Fincher's portrayal of Sweden as an outwardly and proudly modern country overrun with the dehumanizing potential of technology. It's a place haunted equally by industrial remnants of past eras and shameful personal and political histories. The task of Reznor and Ross is to create something conflicted between technology and tradition, and they opt for a sound that's essentially future-baroque: fiercely plucked strings, ominous bass, decaying chimes, and spare pianos held together with meticulous post-processing.
But where Dragon Tattoo excels in its role as soundtrack, it falters in listenability: imagine something like Ghosts I-IV but almost double the length and without all the catchy parts. True, it is easy to admire the sheer complexity of their work in small doses. Pieces like "Hypomania" drift into clouds of hellish distortion and re-emerge, while "Oraculum" features vividly tactile drums that feel heavily removed from your typical Hollywood percussive suspense music. So while this might be a soundtrack, it rises above mere Hollywood muzak.
As the set drifts into its third and final disc, the pace begins to pick up and form shapes that might be recognizable to Reznor adherents. "Great Bird of Prey" could be an instrumental leftover from The Fragile days, while "Infiltrator" weaves in and out of sections of intensely energetic movement. "An Itch" traps what sounds like human screams and moans beneath an actual beat, while the warbly "Closer" piano even makes a reappearance in "The Heretics", a sly wink and nod to its composers' considerable musical history.
For those fans who wouldn't want to spend $300 on a 6xLP box set of soundtrack music, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is likely to remain a curiosity apart from its two bookending vocal tracks. The movie's sleek opening sequence is soundtracked by the Reznor and Karen O's cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song", a mean reminder of the power Reznor's pop music holds at its most ferocious. On the other end of the spectrum, the three hours wind down with a cover of Bryan Ferry's "Is Your Love Strong Enough?" by How to Destroy Angels (the band composed of Ross, Reznor, and wife Mariqueen Maandig). To hear a human voice so bright and clear after what's come before is a moment of pure pop relief. But pop is not what Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is about. It's reasonable to question the necessity of a score whose sprawling mass exceeds the length of the film it's meant for. But even if it doesn't quite work as a standalone experience, the real takeaway here is that Reznor and Ross may be ushering in an exciting new realm of possibility for mainstream film scoring.


The unassuming Melbourne five-piece build garage-jangle guitars and blunt-edged harmonies into strangely hypnotic arrangements that feel simultaneously long and short.

Everybody Split

In the age of Bandcamp democratization, anyone with an internet connection can record, say, a collection of Dixie Chicks covers, or an hour of improvisions, and then make it public, no financial strings attached. That’s how Melbourne-based five-piece Possible Humans released their 2016 debut Ringwood/Ozone, one of the more interesting pieces of Bandcamp debris to surface in the past few years. Ringwood/Ozone demonstrated the group’s talent for extending mostly freeform pop across a whole record; strange and often silly, it showed off their chops without really seeming to try. On their new album Everybody Split, Possible Humans marry that penchant for layered, fluid songwriting with an impeccable sense for well-crafted pop songs, resulting in one of Melbourne’s most pleasant rock records in recent memory.
While no songs are as loose as anything from their debut, Everybody Split still shows a certain affinity for raucous guitar jams. The 12-minute “Born Stoned,” the only such long track here, sprints toward a climax of squalling guitars and pounding cymbal. After a run of denser, more ambling songs like “Nomenclature Airspace” and “Stinger,” it arrives as a shock to the system. The vocals feel redundant; even without a lyrical anchor, Possible Humans’ musicianship is a magnetic joy. With no obvious high points nor particularly boring stretches, the album feels paced for start-to-finish listening.
The easiest comparison for Possible Humans’ sound is New Zealand indie rock progenitors the Clean. Saying a band from Melbourne sounds like the Clean is akin to saying a river is wet: nearly always true, and rarely worth noting. Where Everybody Split feels most closely tied is the small scene around Hobbies Galore, the Melbourne-based label that released it. Operated by Alex Macfarlane, a member of beloved local bands the Stevens and Twerps, Hobbies Galore has released excellent records by the Stroppies, Blank Realm, and J. McFarlane’s Reality Guest, and Possible Humans sit flush with its slate of oddball indie rock and post-punk.
Macfarlane also produced Everybody Split, and its garage-jangle guitars and blunt-edged harmonies bear more than a passing resemblance to his 2017 record with the Stevens, Good. But where Macfarlane’s band often sounds as though it’s in a constant state of propulsion, Possible Humans take a different tack: Much of Everybody Split is defined by strangely hypnotic arrangements that feel simultaneously long and short, buzzing with activity but advancing nowhere. Early highlight “Aspiring to Be a Bloke” builds simple guitar lines into something paranoid and noirish; when vocalist Steven Hewitt sings, “Help me, I need to be somewhere/I’m not on time,” it sounds coyly referential, a nod to the song’s tangled structure.
While unassuming on paper, there’s something about Possible Humans’ music that sticks; there are hooks hidden in these songs, obscured by Macfarlane’s production but present enough that you might hum them after even a passive listen. The album’s lack of showiness seems borne of the band’s low-stakes origins; Everybody Split still feels like the work of five musicians messing around on a Sunday afternoon, making an album for the hell of it. It’s so easygoing that one might overlook its fascinating warps of a traditional jangle sound. There’s a beauty in that quality; Possible Humans never demand attention, but they deserve it anyway.


Noname’s first album in five years is a cool and masterful interrogation of the culture. She’s taking everyone’s name—including her own.

Sundial

Sometimes the only way to work through the bullshit is to point at your close friends and ask, “Do you all see this, too, or am I bugging?” Their confirmations stop you from feeling like you’re on a different planet from everyone else. That’s the driving force behind Noname’s first project in five years, the eye-opening and disruptive Sundial. On the first track, with her typical buttery, head-in-the-clouds delivery, she raps, “We smokin’ positivity like dust, trust.” It’s a cutting quip: She’s fed up with anti-critical positivity, the kind that leads corporations to dress up and commodify Black art, turning an artist’s politics into a commercialized performance. She has no time for the idea that It’s all good as long as they’re Black, no matter what they’re selling. Sundial pushes back against that complacency in a real regular-person kind of way. It’s not preachy or too heavy. Noname is not trying to sell herself as a revolutionary. She’s also unafraid of biting self-reflection that leaves her own contradictions out in the open. In rap, where it’s so often about seeming indestructible, hanging yourself out to dry is a gutsy move.
With her loopy, shapeshifting flow and gentle, dynamic voice, Noname uses her sense of humor to seamlessly thread together everyday reflections with anti-imperial ideology. Bars like, “Get that pussy to drip/Wear that drip in the hood,” live cozily alongside, “We is Wakanda/We queen, Rwanda/First Black president, and he the one who bombed us.” They’re both distinctly provocative, the former because of the wordplay, the latter because of the bluntness. Criticizing Disney or Obama is still low-hanging fruit, but Noname lays the line down so matter of factly, as if she knows that. I guess she won’t be on the next playlist.
Noname doesn’t just land blows at big targets for the fun of it; she isn’t getting some takes off or being a hater. Instead she uses these musings to interrogate herself. On “Namesake,” producer Slimwav’s sonorous funk bassline and forceful percussion set the tone for some of the most inspired rapping of the year. “’Cause if you want some money you can say that/You deserve the payback, these niggas took everything,” she spits, seemingly addressing other Black entertainers, less agitated by the single-minded ambition to deepen their pockets than by the fact that they’re pretending otherwise.
Then, the synths deepen, and her fiery raps switch to a cheer-squad cadence as she shades Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar’s working relationships with the NFL (she got Jay-Z in an earlier line). Throwing grenades without taking shelter; it’s shocking to hear another artist challenge them. Eventually, she circles back to herself: “Go Noname go, Coachella stage got sanitized/I said I wouldn’t perform for them and somehow I still fell in line, fuck.” On one side, it’s a slight cop-out, softening her condemnation of the megastars by making sure not to position herself as impervious to the same temptations. And, at the same time, it’s incredibly honest rapping that leaves her vulnerable to scrutiny. Being that real about yourself only sharpens the darts you throw at others.
Like Kendrick’s thrillingly messy therapy session Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, Noname is also wary of the pedestal she’s been placed on. In the years since 2018’s Room 25, she started Noname Book Club, which, by her telling, was a way to use the platform she gained from music to foster community and to familiarize both herself and club members with Black writers across genres. But nothing is ever that simple. The conversation around “the radicalization of Noname,” as The New York Times put it, has caused her—much like Kendrick after winning his Pulitzer—to be slotted into the role of the artist whose voice we so desperately need right now. It’s an impossible image to live up to and the teardown is always inevitable.
A more shameless musician would have run with it as long as they could—channeled the performativity of the Mau Maus from Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, got their own Disney-stamped event for the culture—and cashed out. But Noname amplifies her flaws and normalcy. She’s still in the real world, and not because she’s visiting as some act of radical relatability like Beyoncé riding into the disco on horseback. Caring about shit doesn’t stop her from still getting high, going through the ups-and-downs of relationships (the way she repeatedly claps “Fuck you nigga” on “Toxic” is acidic), and probing her own beauty standards on “Beauty Supply.” The one slight drag of Sundial: In contrast to Noname constantly barring out, her hooks sound a little weak, as on “Hold Me Down,” where her plain melodies are backed by the type of full-throated choir that sounded better on Chance’s Coloring Book.
The features, however, are explosive, especially $ilkmoney on “Gospel?” who opens his verse with, “I’m not gon’ lie, I’m not surprised to hear the Fugees was FBI” over the warmest church pianos, and Jay Electronica, who sets off nuclear bombs name-checking Louis Farrakhan and mocking Ukrainian president Zelenskyy on “Balloons.” Both are outspoken rappers who provoke backlash and don’t seem that bothered by it, something I suspect Noname finds almost aspirational. There is hypocrisy to the inclusion of Jay Electronica, the kind of rapper you might expect Noname would heavily criticize given his blatant antisemitism and closeness with the institutional power of Jay-Z. But she’s as drawn to that messiness as anyone, and because of that, “Balloons” is a thorny track that feels at odds with her messaging. It’s also a full-on rap clinic. “And if you sing about a sister then we buyin’ a ticket for real,” she raps, targeted words that she says with what seems like a sarcastic smirk. Do the open contradictions make the song any less great? It depends on what they are and who you are, and your answer will say as much about her as you. Artists like Spike Lee, Tupac, Kanye West, Kendrick, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé have these inconsistencies. As you have them. As I have them. Noname’s got ’em, too.


The Brainfeeder-affiliated Brooklyn rap duo's debut mixtape has a druggy aesthetic. It's a work of art-damaged mysticism and Issa Dash and Ak's pyrotechnic wordplay, guided by the Entreproducers' broad, psychedelic production palette.

Indigoism

The Brainfeeder-affiliated Brooklyn rap duo the Underachievers are part of New York City's loose knit Beast Coast collective, which counts Joey Bada$$ and his Pro Era crew along with Flatbush Zombies among its membership, and the A$AP Mob as friends. But the Underachievers are a singular presence within the new New York scene. They're not retro-leaning traditionalists like Bada$$, whose 1999 mixtape studiously replicated the vibe of classic 90s New York rap. They're not as aggressively weird as the Flatbush Zombies, and their seriousness of purpose sets them apart from the A$AP Mob's faded party rap. And while many of their contemporaries subscribe to a school of rap that extols the joys of drug use, gleefully cataloguing chemicals consumed, the Underachievers' Issa Dash and Ak treat mind-altering substances like sacraments, like battering rams at the doors of perception. Their debut mixtape, Indigoism, is druggy, but aesthetically so; beneath the surface lies a work of art-damaged mysticism and pyrotechnic wordplay.
Indigoism derives many of its psychedelic properties from its production team, the Entreproducers, whose broad palette supplies Issa and Ak with bountiful and bizarre sounds. "Herb Shuttles" and "T.A.D.E.D" affix spectral keys to the skittering hi-hats and 808s of modern Southern rap. "So Devilish" and "New New York" are built around menacing psych rock grooves. "Revelations" seamlessly marries elements of blues and reggae to trap. Indigoism covers a lot of ground, and there is as much movement within songs as there is between them. "Leopard Shepard" chops a muted horn sample no less than three different ways, and songs like "Gold Soul Theory" and opener "Philanthropist" modulate between divergent verse and chorus sections like a live band would. Even meat-and-potatoes boom bap numbers "6th Sense" and "The Madhi" sneakily shift melodic elements in and out of the mix as they progress. Indigoism's one relative constant on the production front is a tendency toward a low BPM.
Slower beats are the perfect launchpad for the breakneck doubletime raps and stop-on-a-dime flow shifts that are the Underachievers' calling card. Indigoism's dizzying flurry of internal rhymes matches California rap luminaries Kendrick Lamar and Ab-Soul at their most switched on, but where the Black Hippy crew likes to slow things down periodically to air out the rhyme schemes, the Underachievers rarely let up. It's as if they have too much to say without the time to get it all out. The fury of their lyricism also calls back to unsung technicians of 90s rap like Freestyle Fellowship and Organized Konfusion, acts possessed of an almost intimidatingly masterful command of words. This isn't to say that Underachievers' ability to rap very well is a liability, but Issa and Ak's battery of lyrical speed trials occasionally feels one-note when spread over 16 songs. Indigoism clocks in at under an hour, but it feels longer than it is, and is probably most effectively ingested in smaller doses.
After more than a year of sporadic live shows and piecemeal track releases, this full reveal of Underachievers' vision shows a group that's thick with promise. Issa Dash and Ak are intriguing thinkers with formidable mic skills and a team of producers challenging them with moving, breathing soundscapes. In an era rife with aesthetes playing dress up with rap and auteurs who treasure texture and feel over good old-fashioned musicality, the Underachievers are a monument to the complex lyricism and drug-friendly experimentation of Souls of Mischief and the offbeat spirituality of the mystics in the Dungeon Family. But Indigoism isn't really about showing off a good record collection; it's about digesting influences and turning out something vaguely familiar but somehow brand new.


Two years ago, Teen Dream felt like such a complete realization of Beach House's potential that it had to make you wonder where they could possibly go from there. By just about every measure, the Baltimore duo's fourth album is stronger than anything they've done before.

Bloom

Beach House's decision to call this record Bloom is almost too perfect. Over the course of four albums that's exactly what this band has done. Two people from Baltimore started by making incense-smelling, curtains-drawn bedroom pop. Now, eight years later, they make luminous, sky-sized songs that conjure some alternate universe where Cocteau Twins have headlined every stadium on Atlantis. "Bloom" is also what these 10 songs do, each one starting with the sizzle of a lit fuse and at some fine moment exploding like a firework in slow motion. The word captures the music's slow sonority: the round, gleaming edges of Alex Scally's arpeggios and how, in Victoria Legrand's unhurried mouth, all words seem to have a few extra vowels.
And here we thought they'd already bloomed. Two years ago, Beach House signed to big-time indie Sub Pop, started selling out larger rooms, and put out their first great record, Teen Dream. Brimming with lush sadness and lyrics that painstakingly documented the evaporation of a love ("It can't be gone," Legrand gasped on "10 Mile Stereo", "We're still right here"). Teen Dream was a break-up album, a clearer and more assured exploration of the exquisite, minor-key feelings the band had been mining since their self-titled debut. It felt like such a complete realization of the band's potential that it had to make you wonder-- a little worried, even-- where could they possibly go from here?
Bloom suggests that this is the wrong question. "I hate it when bands change between records," Scally admitted recently. "[T]hat's not the way we work." And he's right: Beach House haven't changed, or at least not much. Bloom doesn't stray far from the structure or the emotional tenor of its predecessor. It finds the band making small, sharp adjustments to its craft, but these shifts are so subtle it takes a few listens for them to sink in. The songwriting is tighter, yet the atmosphere feels more diffuse; the lyrics are more straightforward, yet they're somehow suggestive of larger things. By just about every measure, Bloom's wingspan is fuller than anything Beach House have done before.
Much of the power of Beach House's music lies in the way it forgoes simple, this-means-this storytelling in favor of communicating indescribable emotions. Still, Bloom has a definite thematic fascination with idle youth and the bittersweet residue that remains once it's gone. "Troublemaker" looms with the threat of bad romance, and the brazen, epic "Wild"-- one of their best songs yet-- conjures teenage feelings of boredom, broken homes ("Our father won't come home, 'cause he is seeing double"), and the inordinate amounts of faith placed in the things that take someone out of those particular hells ("That's when your car pulls up, its hood is black and gleaming"). Legrand's ethereal contralto huffs so much life into her lines that even lyrics that look plain on the page take flight. Throughout, Legrand and Scally sound in perfect sync: his nimble riffs punctuate her long, drawn-out notes to add depth and layered rhythm to the tracks.
Toward the end comes a mid-tempo, quietly spectacular song called "Wishes", on which Legrand sings about "the moment when a memory aches." It might be tempting to call that feeling nostalgia. But the sort of nostalgia Bloom employs feels so distant from the definition that word has taken on lately when we talk about music. What they do feels not just wonderfully self-contained but improbably intimate: It's a huge testament to Legrand and Scally that, although they're one of the most popular bands in the indiesphere at the moment, their music still has the hushed air of an overheard secret.
Filmmakers call the part of the day right before the sun goes down "the magic hour." It's that brief moment when the waning daylight causes everything to take on a holy, hazy glow. It took Terrence Malick about a year to shoot his 1978 movie Days of Heaven because he insisted on filming only during this time of day, but the results perfectly capture and distend that dizzy, overripe feeling of right before something very good ends. Bloom does that, too. "What comes after this momentary bliss?" Legrand wonders on "Myth". It's a question Beach House don't seem interested in answering any time soon. Because that's become their signature magic trick: stopping time right before the sun disappears over the horizon, tricking you into believing a feeling can last forever.