7 Days of Funk is Snoop Dogg recording in laid back mode as “Snoopzilla” and Dâm-Funk revamping the classic synthesizer melodies, electronic basslines, and digital drums that coursed through funk both before and after they attached the “g-” to it. It was home-recorded and assembled quickly, and the easygoing nature shines through.

7 Days of Funk

“This isn't a comedic tribute to talkboxes and widebrims; there's no Snoop Dogg descending a foggy staircase through a faded VHS haze here.” That's how the last paragraph of my review of Dâm-Funk's Toeachizown kicked off, and in hindsight it's sort of a strange thing to say in the album's favor. “Sensual Seduction” (or “Sexual Eruption”, depending on your comfort level) was a funny throwback showcase on video, but it also clicked big-time as an actual funk song; get past the then-unusual novelty of Snoop as crooner and it's the kind of tribute to 1981 that doesn't sound like an extended eyeroll at the era's expense. Would Snoop warbling those same kind of come-ons over some of Dâm's vamp-heavy slow-roller instrumentals really sound that ridiculous?
7 Days of Funk makes it immediately clear that it doesn't. Far from ridiculous, it's actually the most natural thing in the world, work from two musicians who grew up on the same sounds and were born less than a year apart. Snoop, recording as “Snoopzilla” as a conscious homage to the influence of Bootsy Collins, is in top laidback mode here, the self-assured smoothness that made him a star gliding along whether he's (serviceably) singing or (engagingly) rapping. Dâm-Funk's thing is revamping and renewing the classic synthesizer melodies, electronic basslines, and digital drums that coursed through funk both before and after they attached the “g-” to it, a triple-layered take on 80s electro-boogie, 90s West Coast hip-hop, and contemporary nu-funk that helps the music work on all these different levels. And with both artists' stated mission to do this project as a fuck-the-radio labor of love—home-recorded and assembled quickly, with a rush owing more to easy inspiration than stressful deadlines—the easygoing nature shines, even through the cuts that wax ambivalent about love or challenge rivals to step up.
The leadoff cut “Hit Da Pavement” pulls off this vibe from the word go, the titular refrain initially reading like a duck-down threat on paper but evoking that other meaning of hitting the pavement; Snoop's “you don't work, you don't eat” language acting as the prime motivator. He pulls off romantic appeals without sounding syrupy (“I'll Be There 4U”) and breakup ruminations without sounding antagonistic (“Faden Away”)—the kind of unflappable ease that still sounds satisfied with his vet-status years instead of bored by them. He's not Nate Dogg or anything, but his workmanlike singing voice is smooth enough to mesh with the piled-high space-flight chords Dâm-Funk uses to buoy it. It's late-night party music that sounds equally calibrated for winding down or getting worked up, and Dâm's typical propensity to let rhythms and riffs soak for a bit before taking off into solo turf keeps it moving.
It's a strong mode to be in, but 7 Days of Funk doesn't change or challenge things—it's a brief LP, even accounting for bonus tracks, and with everybody firmly in a comfortable lane there's not much surprise. There's Steve Arrington again, following up Higher with an engagingly quirky spotlight turn on “1Question?” that makes Snoop sound like a guest on his own track. Toeachizown highlight “I Gots 2 Be Done Wit' U” repurposed and given a new squiggly outro solo for “Do My Thang”. And the smooth-rolling vibe is so seamless and immersive that even the slightest deviation from it sounds jarring—Kurupt's verse on “Ride” is perfunctory though not terrible, and yet over that backdrop he sounds so far out of the pocket you'd need a chain wallet to bring him back. This isn't the out-of-nowhere clash of strange bedfellows that some people might imagine from a “Snoop on Stones Throw?!” expectation—in fact, it feels practically inevitable. Without the element of surprise or clashing styles forced to compromise, though, all you've got is a solid record that does exactly what you'd hope it does, nothing you think it shouldn't, and not quite enough to make you feel like they've explored every idea they could.


In his most directly political album yet, the Tuareg guitarist lets his solos become the sound of his fury when his Tamasheq lyrics aren’t enough.

Funeral for Justice

Uranium extraction is backbreaking work. Workers spend hours in the mines operating heavy machinery while risking exposure to radioactive chemicals. In Niger, uranium comprises almost its entire export product, but its government sees virtually none of the profit. Instead, France, its former colonial occupier, still controls most of the country’s supply, using the minerals to power a third of its domestic electricity while almost 90 percent of Nigerien citizens are left without access to power. And though France finally relinquished all military bases in Niger following a 2023 military coup, many of its mines remain active to this day, leaking radon into the water supply of surrounding towns.
On his new album Funeral for Justice, Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar addresses these abuses directly. “Why does your ear only heed France and America?/Occupiers are carving up your lands/Gallantly marching all over your resources,” he sings in his native Tamasheq on its title track. You might not pick up on all of the finer details from listening to the first song from Moctar’s monumental new album, but it’s hard to miss the sound of righteous fury in its opening guitar chords, which ricochet like the first shots in battle. When speaking to The New York Times, Moctar said he wanted to make his guitar sound like a person crying for help, or the piercing cry of an ambulance’s siren. In his most directly political album yet, Moctar lets his solos become the sound of his fury when his Tamasheq lyrics aren’t enough.
“I make music to make people smile,” Moctar recently told Crack Magazine, and so far, that music has garnered him plenty of success among Western audiences. Just a few weeks ago, Moctar and his exceptional live band—Souleymane Ibrahim on percussion, Ahmoudou Madassane on rhythm guitar, and Mikey Coltun on bass—took the stage at Coachella to bring their exhilarating live show to their biggest crowd yet. At that performance, Moctar himself couldn’t help but grin as he stepped away from the mic and began one of his now legendary solos, his fingers nimbly dancing across both the body and fretboard of his lefty guitar, stacking melodies atop each other until they seemed to take on a life of their own.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the lyrics scan as an immediate plea to the American audiences: “My people are crying while you laugh/All you do is watch.” And perhaps just to get his point across more fiercely, Mdou Moctar does not shy away from power chords or distortion, instead leaning into the anger and power of the D.C. punk scene that birthed bassist and producer Coltun on “Funeral for Justice.” “Sousoume Tamacheq” is a synthesis of these ideas, meshing a breakneck rhythm section with the sounds of traditional Tuareg instruments like the three-string fretless tehardent or the gourd-shaped calabash. The result is an exuberant and enraged call for Tamasheq unity that sounds just as urgent as it reads on the page.
Funeral for Justice is the result of extended improvised sessions with the full Mdou Moctar band, condensed and edited by Coltun for maximum impact. The band often develops its music live, and there’s an artifact of that process here: “Imouhar,” the spellbinding, slow-building ode to Tamasheq cultural pride, grew from an instrumental riff on 2022’s Niger EP Vol. 1. Layered over nothing but a simple drum machine, that guitar rhythm was promising yet ultimately limited—without a full band, the 13-minute song seemed stuck in an endless groove. But the album version, with a full band and Moctar’s voice, transforms the song into a swaggering blues rock stunner. For the first minute of the song, it sounds as if everyone is performing behind a screen, before a surging guitar solo crashes like a tidal wave, flooding every possible inch of listenable air with Moctar’s towering fretwork, each transition more nimble than the last.
For Moctar, music is inextricably linked with political expression: the assouf or “desert blues” Tuareg musical lineage from which Moctar partially derives his style has always been a way of engendering unity and documenting sociopolitical upheaval. Moctar’s sentiments were clear on his 2021 album Afrique Victime: “Africa is a victim of so many crimes/If we stay silent it will be the end of us.” But the urgency of his message could be overlooked if all the listener chooses to hear is an uptempo guitar groove. On Funeral for Justice, it’s impossible to miss—from the blood dripping off of the crows on its album cover to the screeching guitars that open its first song, it’s the proud sound of rebellion, transposed from Tamasheq into a language that refuses to be misinterpreted.


The veteran avant-garde jazz saxophonist and composer Henry Threadgill collaborates with pianist Jason Moran on his latest. The project offers plenty of room for twisty, adventurous solos, while also feeling like a tight 47 minutes.

Henry Threadgill / Ensemble Double-Up: Old Locks and Irregular Verbs

Old Locks and Irregular Verbs

When it comes to stressing jazz’s long-term relationship with popular song, the pianist Jason Moran is a seasoned campaigner. For Blue Note, Moran has covered Afrika Bambaataa’s "Planet Rock"—and also updated vintage Fats Waller songs, bringing a modern-day R&B sensibility to early-jazz dance hits. At other junctures, Moran has shown an affection for more experimental forms, by working with loft-jazz titan Sam Rivers or else investigating operatic song.
Plenty of elite musicians can genre-hop like this. Fewer can bring academic-sounding concepts and groove together into an individual language that cheats neither tradition. So it makes sense that veteran saxophonist and composer Henry Threadgill is one of Moran’s heroes—and that Moran would one day wind up in one of this giant’s bands. Since the 1970s, Threadgill has honed an urgent and bluesy sound (usually on alto saxophone), while also leading ensembles that feature unusual combinations of instruments (like tuba and cello).
"My head nods to Threadgill just as deep as it does J Dilla," Moran has said. And it’s true that Threadgill expects his bandmates to keep track of a beat, even when his compositions tilt away from traditional harmony—as has been the case over the past decade. On his new record, Threadgill steps back from playing entirely, in order to conduct an opus that springs from his bumptious and melodically pungent late style. Old Locks and Irregular Verbs is an extended work that Threadgill composed as a tribute to the late avant-jazz pioneer Butch Morris (who developed a method for leading group improvisations that is known as "conduction"). Like the best Morris performances, Old Locks offers plenty of room for twisty, adventurous solos, while also feeling like a tight 47 minutes.
Threadgill’s lineup includes Moran as well as the Cuban progressive jazz talent David Virelles (on separate pianos), the two-alto attack of saxophonists Curtis MacDonald and Roman Filiu, driving percussion courtesy of Craig Weinrib—and a pair of veterans from the band Zooid, Threadgill’s other active performing vehicle. Given their deep experience with the composer’s recent work, Jose Davila’s tuba and Christopher Hoffman’s cello provide some of the album’s most rewarding soloing. (On CD and in download versions, the recording is indexed into four "parts," but it’s meant to be absorbed as a whole.)
"Part 1" starts off with delicate piano interplay, courtesy of Moran and Virelles. An early, descending run of chords establishes an air of a lament before collapsing into a stark tone-cluster, signaling that this tribute to the departed will not be a meek or morose affair. The end of the brief "Part 2" sees Weinrib moving between spacier playing and blasts of fractured funk. Hoffman has a sublime cello feature at the start of "Part 3"—full of quick exclamations and longer, graceful lines. "Part 4" kicks off with the pianists, once again. This time, however, they’re collaborating on a lushly harmonized, hymn-like theme. Even the improvised runs of dissonance have an ecstatic feel by this point, and when the full ensemble joins in, Threadgill’s memorial to Morris’ life and art feels emotionally complete.
The set marches on from grief over a lost comrade, and in doing so eventually creates a fervent celebration of the lived experience. Jazz’s roots are in New Orleans, and so the music has always had access to post-funeral stomp. But as with his manner of approaching any other genre tradition, Threadgill works new changes on the expected patterns. He’s a fan of vintage tools, but an experimentalist when it comes to grammar. Despite the fact it doesn’t contain a single note of his own searing saxophone playing, Old Locks and Irregular Verbs remains pure Threadgill—and a highlight in career stocked with more than a few classics.


Yaeji’s debut channels a lifetime’s worth of anger into an airy blend of synth-pop, jazz, techno, and ambient. It’s a generous, understated exploration of rage as a source of creative renewal.

With a Hammer

The great women artists of modern history knew that the most intense, powerful kind of rage may wield a hammer, but the hammer is the means and not the end. Tracey Emin’s bed lies unmade, soiled and strewn with detritus. Betye Saar’s glass Aunt Jemima bottle is recast as a Molotov cocktail, a Black Power fist gripping the wick. Yoko Ono offered audiences scissors to snip her clothes, an invitation to violate, and perhaps consider, a woman. Each piece is a symbol: the physical manifestation of the fury within, confrontation as a conduit for something greater, something that affects a shift.
On With a Hammer, Yaeji offers it all up: the person, her rage, and the symbol. The Korean American New Yorker fabricated two aluminum sledgehammers that she keeps nearby at home and in the studio, blunt instruments as signifiers: power, protection, comfort. She wields one on the cover of With a Hammer, thrown casually over her shoulders—the way construction dudes do in the male imagination—and glances sideways, either daring the viewer to step to her or inviting us to join in.
Yaeji has said that With a Hammer, her full-length debut, was created in a maelstrom: suppressed childhood memories, rolling waves of alienation, anger at increased violence against Asian Americans, revelations during the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020, that euphoric pique when you finally realize you’re really not as small as the world would have you believe. In an accompanying 111-page booklet of her artwork, outfit photos, and song sketches, she includes an epic comic about a wizard dog that helps her unleash her anger—it emerges through her mouth in hammer form, of course—and the concept is both sweet and unexpectedly moving. In her own fury she locates creativity and beauty, experimentation and scrutiny, acerbity and warmth. In destruction, hammers create anew, and Yaeji seeks her own kind of rebirth, venturing musically beyond the club and finding deliverance in the sound of her voice.
Here, the infectious house music on which she built her career makes way for the space between the notes, and her melodic acumen is clear and often gripping. Commingling synth-pop (“Done (Let’s Get It),” “Away x5”) with classical and jazz (“I’ll Remember for Me, I’ll Remember for You”) and exploring the outskirts of techno and ambient, Yaeji’s self-actualization comes as she tries to disentangle the inner workings of a big, freaky universe. On album opener “Submerge FM,” a bilingual contemplation of space and time, she interrogates conventional concepts of past and present and how their authority affects our collective sense of community: “I can see myself in you and yourself in me, and we’re all a part of one,” she harmonizes in a nigh-transcendent state, flute trills crafting curlicues around her promise.
Yaeji assembled a collective of friends to play and sing on With a Hammer: Collaborations like the sumptuous “Happy,” with Baltimore musician Nourished by Time, and contemplative “Ready or Not,” with NYC producer K Wata, embody the philosophy that in community, satisfying new artistic avenues open up. “Michin,” with fellow producer Enayet, roils with sub-bass as Yaeji readies herself to smash the negative self-talk, and maybe some state property along the way. “How you like it now?” she asks in an alto snarl, the rhetoric of a street confrontation. It’s the part when tension approaches triumph, when the audience begins to cheer. As she works through her bruises, she seems to reach the conclusion that fearlessness and hope are the only response to social and internal plagues. Strengthened with resolve, Yaeji even offers her services: On “1 Thing to Smash,” with the producer Loraine James, she sings in Korean that she’ll smash up “what’s distressing you” over a soothing bouquet of ambient flute and synth.
With a Hammer captures Yaeji's emotional transformation, a painful but necessary part of getting older. In the newfound freedom to break stuff, she chronicles her growth as a musician and, perhaps, as an Asian American woman artist disposing of presumptions and circumstances beyond her control. “Passed Me By,” a stunning highlight built on cinematic synth chords and an analog drum kit, is an offering to her former self, a fusion of child Yaeji with the grown, protective adult. “Anything that touches me will evaporate,” she sings airily, as if in prayer, “And fly higher and higher.” Half of rage is confronting the sorrow that births it and watching it metamorphize. Witnessing the chrysalis is With a Hammer’s most generous gift.


UK grime fixture Mr Mitch’s latest LP explores a pared-back sound. It feels polished and tactile, with themes of loyalty, accountability, and fatherhood.

Devout

For a brief period in September of 2013, the UK grime scene went to war. This time, though, the battleground was Soundcloud, and the soldiers were the genre’s producers, who turned out a fearsome barrage of beats—christened “war dubs”—aimed at their peers and rivals. In the spirit of Jamaican soundclash culture, there was the sense that this battle was as much about the flexing of technical ability as any real enmity. One producer rose above the fray: Mr. Mitch, real name Miles Mitchell, who dropped a selection of soft, sample-driven tracks he called “Peace Edits,” and in doing so, all but left with the spoils.
Time has proven this to be not so much a conceptual feint as an expression of Mitchell’s character. There is no front to the music he makes, no rough edges. Instead, Devout—like its predecessor, 2014’s Parallel Memories—explores a pared-back, gossamer sound, with emotions to the fore. Mitchell is no outsider: he runs his own label, Gobstopper Records, and is one of four producers behind London clubnight Boxed, a home for inventive, off-the-wall productions that has been credited as an engine behind grime’s revival. But he is also a father of two from suburban South London and his own artist albums reflect this reality, exploring the sanctuary of home life and matters of the heart.
Parallel Memories was pretty but almost too minimal, sometimes feeling short of a layer or two. It would be deceptive to claim Devout is heavier, but it is compositionally tighter, and roughly half the tracks feature vocals from Mitchell and a small coterie of guests. There are still qualities that harken back to grime: the 16 bar structures, the wriggling, liquid melodies. But where grime generally works from an abrasive, lo-fi palette, Devout feels polished and tactile, reminiscent of Fatima Al Qadiri’s forays in sino-grime, or the ’80s synth ambient of Ryuichi Sakamoto.
ASMR enthusiasts will find a lot to love in the pizzicato violin and breathy synth washes of “Lost Touch”—or “Black Tide,” with its analog camera sounds and melodies that squeak like a squeegee on a windowpane. The album’s vocal turns, meanwhile, veer soulful, grappling with love and relationships from a mature perspective. On “Fate,” Denai Moore whips up a quiet storm as she puts an end to a floundering love affair. “VPN” captures the pain of separation, with fellow South Londoner Palmistry’s airy cod-patois afloat over blown-glass melodies and a gentle kick.
Parenthood is a vexed topic in popular music; the rap album blighted by the saccharine track about Dad life is a cliché for a reason. Devout tackles this conundrum head on. The sole MC moment on the album comes courtesy of P Money, who raps about fatherhood on “Priority.” His delivery balances #blessed vibes with a glimpse of struggle and challenge, and Mitchell is canny enough to pair it with a beat laced with just a shred of anxiety—you can feel the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. More sentimental are the moments when Mitchell himself takes the mic, his voice tinted with Autotune. On “Intro,” he croons accompanied by samples of his sons at play, while “Oscar” is a song directed towards his newborn, set to childlike xylophone chimes. They come over as more imperfect than the rest of Devout, but their homemade intimacy feels like an end in itself.
Describing the concept of the album, Mitchell has spoken of challenging negative representations of black fatherhood: “We all know the stereotype of the black dad with multiple children from multiple partners who is absent from the child’s life, we see it consistently in popular culture,” he says in promotional materials. “I want to champion the alternative, which to me is just normal.” Loyalty and accountability are topics that seldom make it into popular music, but Devout finds bliss in its sense of balance. From its gentle textures come a calm centeredness, from its soft words a sense of strength.


The Edmonton MC has served as the official poet laureate of his hometown, so it's surprising the strength of his third album doesn't lie in his writing or his rapping.

Hope in Dirt City

The rapper Cadence Weapon, onetime Pitchfork contributor Rollie Pemberton, was the official poet laureate of his hometown of Edmonton, so it's a surprise that the strength of his third album, Hope in Dirt City, doesn't lie in his writing or his rapping. It's an album from an artist who has improved the overall direction of his music, but who still has room to grow as an MC. Hope in Dirt City is not a great album-- and there are more than a few moments that make me wince-- but as much I want to dismiss it, I'm left with the sense that Pemberton is working toward something, and that he's fearless enough to one day achieve it. The album itself is no endgame, but transitions have gone far worse.
For Hope in Dirt City, Pemberton has thankfully ditched the flimsy, starter-kit electro of 2008's Afterparty Babies. Instead we get warm, live instrumentation and tasteful, fruitful dips into 2-tone ("Small Deaths"), the synths of deep-house ("There We Go"), the pink-hued funk of Vice City ("Hope in Dirt City"), and a palate-cleansing Madvillainy homage ("Cheval"). The beats here are often jazzy, and even when that jazziness turns into outright skronk on a song like "Jukebox", the production rewards immersion. Despite the slight genre experiments, there's a looseness to the playing that holds everything together.
As impressive and encouraging as the production is, Pemberton's rapping isn't up to snuff. He's still overly dry and often noticeably amateurish, and he sometimes pushes himself to do things he can't. On opener "Get on Down", for instance, he kicks off the chorus by awkwardly spelling out his name and then continues to trip all over himself during the second verse as he tries to speed up his flow. Other times, like on "There We Go" or "Hope in Dirt City", he'll fall into a flow that's much closer to talking than rapping. There are also a few choruses that show off how unpolished he can be as a writer, be it when he devolves into screaming ("Jukebox") or when he introduces a melody that clashes with the rest of the song (the title track, "No More Names [Aditi]"). Likewise, his writing doesn't offer much to grab onto: The album focuses mostly on boys chasing girls, but his critical eye fails to do much to illuminate either his life or the listener's.
Pemberton is a rap outsider, and one of the positive things to take away from Hope in Dirt City is that this may have given him the license and the freedom to let the listener watch him figure himself out. Not all of his targets are hit, but there are moments here where you can squint and see something that could be built upon. The notable example is the single "Conditioning", which in its second half features the best honest-to-goodness singing on the album. Pemberton's vocals are impassioned, but he also perfectly harnesses the range of his voice, lilting at the end of a few lines into a falsetto while growling as he delivers others. He hits that same sweet spot in the album's final minute as well, allowing the record to at least close with its best foot forward. Rapping becomes singing becomes screaming with a fluid sonic identity to match, and though there are some misses, the process itself provides its own fleeting charms.


Megafaun member offers his solo debut, a collection of instrumental folk compositions mostly for acoustic guitar, banjo, and harmonica.

Phil Cook & His Feat: Hungry Mother Blues

Hungry Mother Blues

Megafaun stand out from a crowded field of Americana-inspired indie rock bands because of their investment in musical heritage, from old-time string bands and traditional folk ballads to jazz to 20th century classical. Last September in Durham, the historically rich North Carolina city the band calls home, they collaborated with former bandmate Justin Vernon, Brooklyn singer/songwriter Sharon Van Etten, and Virginia jazz combo Fight the Big Bull on an expansive reinterpretation of one of American folk's sacred documents, Sounds of the South, the anthology recorded by Alan Lomax circa 1960. It's no stretch to imagine that Megafaun multitasker Phil Cook's immersion in this venerable material shaped the deep-rooted simplicity of his solo debut.
During the Sounds of the South premiere, I was especially enamored of Cook's sensitivity as an instrumentalist. On the piano, he had a gracefully leaping sense of melody, and on the banjo, he played clusters of sweet harmonics in places where a less humble musician might have soloed hard. This tasteful and generous temper suffuses Hungry Mother Blues, a collection of instrumental folk compositions mostly for acoustic guitar, banjo, and growling resonator; perhaps a dash of harmonica for color. Cook's Feat are actually just his feet, lightly whomping on a homemade stompbox. He's alone and yet not, conversing with a pantheon of American innovators who favor expressivity over flash: people such as slide guitarist Ry Cooder, the fingerstyle guitarist John Fahey, and the shapeshifting Bill Frisell.
The album opens with the welcoming breeze of "Frazee, Minnesota", whose lead melody strongly resembles the vocal part of Arthur Russell's "Maybe She". While almost certainly coincidental, it gives you an idea of how melodically lucid Cook's writing is. The fluent "Juniper" is just as eminently hummable, to an almost crazy degree for instrumental music. These are simple, bucolic themes, brought to life with a deft assortment of bends, slides, and evolving transpositions. Offsetting the earworms are groove-and-atmosphere focused tracks such as the gently galloping, clawhammer banjo tune "Waiting 'Round the Oven Buns" and the Cooder-esque "Ballad of a Hungry Mother". Overall, it's a great chance to hear the subtle and relaxed touch Cook brings to Megafaun unadorned, save for the barest four-on-the-floor beats here and there.
Still, let's be clear: This is not a Megafaun record. There are no freak-outs or electronic interventions or field recordings. It's eight casual-feeling songs in just under 20 minutes, though it's quite diverse within those narrow confines, flowing easily from the moony blues of "Sparrowander" to the cockier swagger of "The Last Steam Engine Train". Hungry Mother Blues shows us some of the basic underpinnings beneath Megafaun's gritty inventions, reminding us that if you want to make something really new, it helps to be deeply coversant with the old.


22Gz attempts to chase a hit on a melodic but stale mixtape that struggles to keep up with the drill scene the Brooklyn rapper helped originate.

Growth & Development

Brooklyn’s drill rap scene began as a ripoff of Chicago’s movement, the sign of a borough that had lost its way. In late 2016, Flatbush’s 22Gz released “Suburban,” a song that sounds like it was made in Chicago’s summer of 2012—the flow is jacked from a teenage G Herbo and the beat might as well be ripped from DJ L’s hard drive. But despite its lack of originality, “Suburban” opened up the possibilities of what drill could become in New York. 22Gz injects the single with the cockiness and swagger that has forever pulsed through the veins of Brooklyn’s premier rappers. Within the next few months, as drill rap became inescapable in the city, 22Gz went to jail.
In the spring of 2017, during a trip to Miami, 22Gz and his friends were involved in an argument over a parking spot. The disagreement resulted in the death of two people and 22Gz was arrested and charged with murder. After spending nearly half the year in jail, the case against him never came together, and he was released at the end of 2017. When 22Gz returned to Brooklyn’s drill scene, behind the force of fellow Flatbush rapper Sheff G, drill had progressed. Even as his visibility was raised through signing to Kodak Black’s Sniper Gang imprint, 22Gz’s style lagged behind. His 2019 mixtape, The Blixky Tapet, sounds like it’s from another era.
On “Suburban Pt. 2,” the first single from 22Gz’s new mixtape Growth & Development, he makes up some lost ground. It follows the path set by the late Pop Smoke, who separated Brooklyn’s drill from the dead-eyed aggression more common in Chicago; instead, he talked cold-hearted shit while hitting a goofy dance, and without losing an ounce of his intimidation—a balancing act that’s essential in Brooklyn’s latest wave of drill rap. Like, yes, the centerpiece of 22Gz’s “Suburban Pt. 2” is a brutal threat (“Bust your piñata, open your māthā, shoot up the party”), but it’s still catchy and silly enough to have inspired infinite TikTok dance videos.
But it becomes clear that the purpose of Growth & Development isn’t to be a good mixtape—it’s just 12 shots at finding a single to follow-up “Suburban Pt. 2.” He comes close with the effortless “No Questions,” like someone put a mic in his face and told him to cut a wrestling promo: “Don’t test us, have my yungin’ take his necklace/Got a temper, make a movie like Netflix.” Though 22Gz no longer has a definitive style of his own, often the songs on the project are dated.
There are tracks on the project that sound like they could have landed on an early 2010s Troy Ave mixtape, specifically “ATB,” a reminder of a Brooklyn rap era that made an entire generation turn to Chicago drill in the first place. 22Gz’s attempt at a melody is forced, and “Twirl Girl” is the type of unbearable “modern” rap song you would hear on Empire. He takes another step backward with “The Oath” and “Careers,” both of which have none of Brooklyn’s signature flash and production reminiscent of the cheap Chicago imitations the scene was known for in its earliest days. It’s almost as if 22Gz is out of touch with his own borough, like he has never taken the time to scroll through the Raps & Hustles YouTube page—the unofficial home of Brooklyn drill. The irony is that it’s clear he’s struggling to keep pace with the rapid evolution of a Brooklyn drill scene built on the foundation he laid.


A new EP of soft, slowcore music from Maya Bon and Ryan Albert arrives like a postscript, elaborating on past themes of grief and accountability with a darker scrawl.

Sunk

California expat Maya Bon and collaborator Ryan Albert of Babehoven put on Elliott Smith’s Either/Or and sprawled out on the floor of their apartment in the mountains of Vermont. After the dreamy maximalism of last year’s EP Nastavi, Calliope—a catalog of requiems equal parts clever and anguished—they hoped to embellish their new project with Smith’s deckle-edged sound. Armed with little more than a MIDI keyboard, together they trouble Bon’s old conclusions, questioning whether loss or forgiveness are ever really final.
Sunk, their first release with Double Double Whammy, is a summer hailstorm of contradictions. It arrives like a postscript, elaborating on past themes of grief and accountability with a darker scrawl. Brooding slowcore percussion texturizes Bon’s creaky riffs and sometimes-haunting-sometimes-angelic vocals—“I don’t know how to love anymore,” Bon whispers. While the band upholds their indie charm, Bon shows off the range of her voice—borrowing from both shoegaze and country antecedents—tracing a lineage from Grouper’s Liz Harris back to Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval. She distinguishes herself by resisting tidy melodic turns and pop hooks, offering instead a sonic kaleidoscope made even more beautiful by its complexity.
The poet Adrienne Rich famously claimed to use formalism like asbestos gloves—it allowed her to handle material she couldn’t pick up barehanded. For Bon, this is humor. Heartbreak, an absent father, the death of her pets, and now climate anxiety, land mismanagement, misogyny: she plumbs the existential depths with a comedic spade. On the lethargic lead single, “Fugazi,” she laments that a guy thought he’d been the one to introduce her to the D.C. punk band. Of course, Maya Bon knows Fugazi. Like Ian MacKaye, she plays her wit the way she plays her hurt: with a straight face. Her voice leaden with fatigue, she continues, “It doesn’t make sense why it hurt me.” But the irony only punctuates the pain; it makes perfect sense, and her guitar is showing you why.
In Bon’s world, vulnerability thrums against intellect, the quotidian against the grandiose. On the stirring, folk-operatic seven-minute closing track, “Twenty Dried Chilies,” she describes watching TV on the couch in the same few breaths as a staggering declaration about the cruelty of aging and the fragility of human connection. “I regret sending you that email where I said I wanted to kill you,” she sings, her tone theatrical against a scrim of harp-like strings and keys, like an epic poet enchanting a story with the lyre. Like much of her writing, the line succeeds because it is as much a joke as it is not a joke. Her syllables flutter and tumble over rows of hypnotic fingerpicking, in stark contrast to the stand-out “Creature” which precedes it, whose power resides in its spareness and in whose open strumming and nihilism, Elliott Smith’s influence is clear.
At Brooklyn’s Union Pool in early February, Bon and Albert concluded their set with a kiss onstage. Despite her fears and forfeitures, something like hope emerges between the songs’ softer moments and their buoyant orchestral swells. She does know how to love, we just have to listen for the wink.


The tape is a short, sweet, and potent mix, an example of the good that can happen when seasoned vets link up and operate under the radar and outside of the major label system.

Freddie Gibbs / Curren$y / The Alchemist: Fetti

Fetti

Like a collaborative project conceived on a hip-hop blog’s message board in 2012, Fetti is an underground rap fan’s dream come true. At just nine tracks—some as brief as a minute and 40 seconds—the tape is a short, sweet, and potent mix of what Curren$y, Freddie Gibbs, and producer Alchemist do best. It is also an example of the good that can happen when seasoned vets link up and operate under the radar and outside of the major label system.
Each member of this triumvirate has brushed up against mainstream success and fame before: Curren$y was a charter member of Lil Wayne’s Young Money and his early collaborations with Wiz Khalifa helped propel that Pittsburgh rapper to his breakthrough moment; Freddie Gibbs was once under Young Jeezy’s CTE auspices before their public falling out; and Alchemist has produced hits and album cuts for platinum acts ranging from Mobb Deep to Kendrick Lamar—in addition to being Eminem’s occasional tour DJ. All three have been adjacent to the limelight but never directly in it—but not for lack of talent or exposure. Where they differ from their more visible peers is their choice to sidestep conventional stardom and the inevitable artistic compromise that comes with it. Rather than chasing hits and clout, Gibbs, Curren$y, and ALC have been growing cult followings who revel in the micro-worlds they create.
Gibbs remains the consummate gangsta rapper. He’s one of the sub-genre’s last versatile lyricists whose street savvy and wit are complemented by a gift for flows and ferocious delivery. On “Willie Lloyd,” named for the deceased Vice Lords leader, Gibbs lets loose with a staccato flow: “In my dreams I see Faces of Death/I might pray for you hoes/Get your rosary across your chest/Your soprano can’t fade me like Thanos/I just shipped a whole damn piano up out the West.” Where Gibbs is concerned with stealing the scene, Curren$y is more into setting it, making his verses rich with detail. He uses his words to inspire visions of Jet Life opulence filled with classic cars, beautiful women, and exotic weed strains. On “Tapatio,” a smooth-talking Spitta drives with a female companion who’s so overtaken by the weed and the Anita Baker on the car stereo that her mascara starts running. As always, Curren$y’s music soundtracks a stoner-slash-hypebeast lifestyle with a sound that every kid who has taken a bong rip or lined up to buy a pair of sneakers can relate to and aspire to.
The Alchemist is the centerpiece of the whole affair, the unseen ringleader whose presence is felt without him having to speak a word. He employs a production style that’s all about mood; using ’70s soul records to create the soundscape at the nexus of Blaxploitation soundtracks and eerie, ’80s-style synths. “Saturday Night Special” transports the listener to a dark parking lot and the passenger seat of smoke-filled ’85 Monte Carlo as Gibbs and Spitta talk shit and plot. Gibbs recalls the elements that make up his persona: “I’m controversial with these verbs like Christopher Wallace with words, Felix Mitchell with birds, Malcolm X with the perm.” It’s one of a hundred little moments on Fetti that offer a proof: In the splintered rap world the internet created, every artist worth their salt can carve out a niche and prosper. Curren$y, Gibbs, and Alchemist wouldn’t have it any other way and like Gibbs says here: “Once I made a M, I ain’t give a fuck if I popped or not.”


West Coast rap nostalgist G Perico has spent 2017 on a forward-looking tear. His third full-length release of the year contains his immediate charm.

2 Tha Left

G Perico might initially sound like a straight-ahead West Coast nostalgist. But if he’s craning his neck to look back, he does not stumble over himself in the process. There’s no way around the DJ Quik, Too $hort, and Eazy-E comparisons: Perico lilts his nasally voice with the same crassly blustering swagger, atop similarly synthed G-funk. Still, there’s nothing imitative in his music, and the 29-year old Perico doesn’t fetishize the past, even when stomping around South Central in a still-wet Jheri curl. He’s spent 2017 on a forward-looking tear, releasing a fiercely concentrated solo debut this spring, and sharing space with a pair of fellow up-and-coming California rappers on a collaborative mixtape called G-Worthy this fall. 2 Tha Left, then, is G Perico’s third full-length release of the year, and it feels like a bit of a heat-check.
2 Tha Left is similarly spare as Perico’s last solo outing, though it is bookended by matching intro and outro tracks—which add time and sound a little out of place. This solo album also, for better or worse, folds in a busier cast of featured rappers. TeeCee4800 and A.D. nail their appearances on “What Up Cuz,” building it into a sinister turf taunt. Meanwhile, Curren$y sounds lazily at home on the steal-your-girl “Send Her Home,” clocking in the same verse he’s been rapping for years alongside Perico’s bouncy shit-talk. There isn’t a moment where Perico is upstaged, and his immediate charm is in the stylish near yelp of his rapping voice, the way he struts over a beat. He seems to always be at the top of his register, but he tucks a deceptive range of perky melody into each verse and hook.
All of this plays out over a sleek G-funk backdrop, with plenty of playful nuance in the production. Sleigh bells briefly shake in time with the bass on “Mind Yours,” and some pizzicato tucked deep in the mix on “Affiliated” lends the stomping anthem a delicate menace. Still, it’s the synths that build the world. Most of them are up-front and warm but they take various shapes: pierced whistling, chunky bass tones, shimmering atmosphere.
Perico raps with a casual, plain-spoken lyricism. He never explains or obscures a detail in his storytelling, a writing philosophy he captures in the album’s bark of an opening bar: “Don’t ask me how I do it, watch how I move.” 2 Tha Left catches him perpetually stuck in the middle, almost compromising his come-up. On “Everybody,” a solo track with a jubilant hook that sounds like it was written by or for Kamaiyah, he makes the simple prospect of hope sound wistful with a bare, pattering quip: “Look at me tryna get rich with everybody I know/But I probably can’t trust nobody I know.”
That same paranoia washes over “One Two,” when Perico snaps: “Yeah I love you my nigga, but I don’t know if I can trust you my nigga.” With a droning hook and menacing economy to his detached narrative, Perico turns a song about a police raid and its aftereffects into something grimly mundane. On “Affiliated,” a stomping G-funk anthem with a bassline that sounds like it was pounded out on a janky living room piano, Perico injects the same depressingly shrugging perspective, finding a silver lining in his 10-toes-down ethics: “The G homie just took a dub/I know what you’re thinkin’ ‘Yeah that sounds super long’/But he comin’ home.”
Music is a second act for Perico, who once just dabbled but is now doubling down on his reinvigorated rap career. He went to jail for the second time in 2012 on a gun charge, releasing an album on the day of his surrender. Ever since, he’s been pitching himself as a convincingly timeless and hyperlocal hero, burrowing deeper and deeper into the groove of a second chance.


The Virginia crooner reintroduces himself with a set of sumptuous, retro R&B that’s a soothing, dapper fit for his impressive vocal range.

Shelley FKA DRAM

In 2016, Shelley FKA DRAM captured his essence up to that point on the joyful cover of his debut album, Big Baby D.R.A.M.: a tightly framed shot of the “Cha Cha” rapper cheek to cheek with his Goldendoodle, beaming with a signature toothy smile. Like his inescapable hooks and elastic approach to R&B and hip-hop, the image was contagious with genuine and overwhelming goodwill. But behind the scenes, the Hampton, Virginia artist sank into a battle with addiction, leading to a life-altering stint in rehab last year and a larger reassessment of his artistry. “[“Cha Cha” and “Broccoli”]... they brought me immense success and many, many spoils,” he admitted. “But also, I feel as though the core of what I do was being totally overlooked.”
On his self-titled second album, Shelley seeks to rectify that problem by reintroducing himself under his birth name with a set of sumptuous, retro R&B from a newly peaceful state of mind. Shelley FKA DRAM swaps in his trademark dizzying hooks for the smooth neo-soul and funk he found a groove with on previous highlights like “Sweet Va Breeze” and “Caretaker.” It’s a soothing, dapper fit for his impressive vocal range as Shelley ponders variations of romance through a pensive lens.
The record focuses primarily on the phases of love that make him feel more balanced and secure, but where other men in pop and R&B are prone to cheesy wife-guy platitudes, Shelley is refreshingly old-school about it. He promises a California King size bed and silk sheets to a lover on “The Lay Down,” delivered in his resonant baritone and filled out with lush electric guitar. On “Married Woman,” he warbles melodramatically about an extramarital affair in the horny spirit of “Me and Mrs. Jones,” maintaining traces of the comical energy that lit up his biggest songs. The album’s laid-back sexiness easily suffuses whatever room you play it in, even if Shelley wants to rib you a little as he sets the mood: “Let’s stop trying to pull the wool over each other's eyes/Besides, we only get like this when we horny.”
Featherlight songs like “Beautiful” and “Exposure” drift into a lovesick headspace to explore the first moments of a new connection. “Let me touch your soul just like I touch your skin,” he urges on the latter over heart-filling vocal runs, keys, and a tugging bassline. Later, Shelley teams up with Erykah Badu again for “’93 Acura Vigor,” introduced with a long, spoken intro on the power of collaboration. It’s one of several interstitials meant to guide the listener through his thought process. But here, over a lethargic club beat and sample, the two make eyes at each other in a coy back-and-forth that loses the sly, memorable alchemy of “WiFi.”
Shelley’s mellifluous voice keeps the tone light throughout, even as his lyrics prove more introspective than his previous album. “All Pride Aside” recruits Summer Walker for a rework on the “addicted to love” trope that feels more personal in Shelley’s hands: “Since we not stoppin’ ourselves/I’ll keep lettin’ you if you keep lettin’ me,” he pleads against a wall of stacked background vocals, making the unhealthy codependency clear. “Cooking With Grease” pulls off a similar trick in the opposite direction, with a pared-back, downcast beat to serve his vulnerable side: “I feel used and abused, so I started doing it, too/But I never did it to you,” he croons wearily, at his most unsure of the relationship and working through it with swooning breath control.
As earnest as the album can get, Shelley’s lyrics sometimes tread into mushy territory (“Beautiful as stars lit up by the moon,” while it sounds angelic over gentle piano, is also nonsensical). The relaxed production tends to blend songs, too, which isn’t altogether unintentional; Shelley has said he wants the album to be so easygoing you can throw it on while cleaning the house. But he holds on to a roguish element of surprise: On a cover of Daft Punk’s 2001 heartbreaker “Something About Us,” he makes a natural compromise between his former bubbly exuberance and newfound sincerity. Shelley’s restrained vocals embody the song’s loungey mood, only climbing up to a dreamy falsetto for the bridge. He then mimics the song’s dancing synth line in a high-pitched, meowing ad-lib, a joyously improvisatory moment that captures his present identity: doing whatever he wants and at ease with his new self.

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With her solo debut, AlunaGeorge’s Aluna Francis explores dance music in many forms—pop-house, dancehall, funk, Caribbean and African dance—as a personal refuge and an industry corrective.

Renaissance

AlunaGeorge, the British duo of vocalist Aluna Francis and producer George Reid, never quite got massive, but they did get everywhere. British audiences may know the group best from “White Noise”—Disclosure’s biggest UK hit. Others might remember the glitchy Timbaland homages on 2013’s Body Music, an early revival of now-ubiquitous Y2K pop. If all this genre-shifting made AlunaGeorge a little amorphous as a group, it did mean they got plenty of work. “You could give us one week and we’d do 10 songs,” Francis told Vulture. “Any genre—we’ll just knock them out.”
Between the knockouts, though, brewed increasing frustration with the dance music industry, coming to a head with a bracing manifesto on Francis’s Instagram. Sometimes there’s blatant exploitation; last year, Francis accused a producer outside the group of sexual assault. But it’s often subtler. Dance producers, disproportionately men, often become mega-paid stars, while dance singer-songwriters, disproportionately women, get second billing—or none, made into modern-day Martha Washes. Wash, of course, is Black, and that dynamic also persists: The most successful dance stars tend to be white, with Black artists showing up in interpolations, uncredited samples, pastiches, or plagiarism, but less often in person or pay. Francis knows it well; though many AlunaGeorge features were basically solo Aluna features, and though Reid was often offstage at AlunaGeorge sets, for years she hesitated to go officially solo. “I knew that, as a Black woman alone, I was going to get chewed up,” she said.
On Renaissance, Francis aims to disprove that. The album showcases her curatorial skills—honed from years of DJ sets, streaming playlists, and recently virtual shows as Aluna’s Room—and her range. Maybe as a challenge, Renaissance neither starts nor ends with dance music. The opener, “I’ve Been Starting to Love All the Things I Hate,” is less a product of the club queue than the away message; slow jam “Whistle” unspools a drowsy vocal and sumptuous synth-violin solo. In between is proper dance in many forms: pop-house, dancehall, funk, Caribbean and African dance, and only occasionally R&B, in TLC homage “Sneak.” She’s an excellent curator of features, too: On Mr. Vegas-interpolating “Get Paid,” Aluna cedes the floor to rapper Princess Nokia and Jamaican songwriter Jada Kingdom in assured form, and “The Recipe” pairs Aluna’s ability to channel earnestness with a small fluting note with Kaytranada’s ability to wring wistfulness out of a small chord change.
Francis describes Aluna’s Room as “an introvert’s palace of escape,” and likewise, Renaissance was written for the inner headspace as much as the dancefloor—convenient in a year where those are empty. “Don’t Hit My Line” hammers exes back into the woodwork to a four-to-the-floor beat, but complicates itself: percussion interludes and Francis’s staccato vocal turn the beat polyrhythmic, and the melody leans hard into “I think of you,” like a “New Rules” by someone not totally ready to let go of the old. And lead single “Body Pump,” written with Josh Lloyd-Watson of Jungle, is built like a house-diva showcase, from the torchy first verse to the drop to the triumphant close. But there’s a scrappiness to it, in the froth of handclaps on the bridge—a studio accident, left in—and the way Aluna pushes her voice into the red, frayed and vulnerable. It’s decidedly human, just the thing to play in a “palace of escape”—or at least in one of its many vibrant rooms.

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With help from the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney and erstwhile pop star Michelle Branch, the DIY icon finds new ways to tease out light and dark, allure and anxiety with his key-ignoring baritone.

A Wonderful Beast

Calvin Johnson’s key-ignoring baritone subverts any song it graces—countering rhythms, shifting tones, darkening even the sunniest moods. That voice is a big part of what made Beat Happening’s work deeper than standard DIY twee, and it’s since stirred all his other projects, from the the indie rock of Halo Benders to the dance pop of Selecter Dub Narcotic. Like the contrapuntal emissions of the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, Public Image Limited’s John Lydon, and Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, Johnson’s singing constantly disrupts the music around him.
On A Wonderful Beast, Johnson’s third solo album but first in 13 years, these disruptions begin immediately during opener “Kiss Me Sweetly.” Johnson’s gravity-laden singing battles the soaring highs of turn-of-the-millenium pop star Michelle Branch, dragging them to earth for a sinister love song where the demand for a kiss sounds a little like a threat. Likewise, Johnson’s dense moans chill the bright tones supplied by the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney, the record’s producer and a one-man backing band of guitar, drums, bass, and keyboards.
It might seem odd that Johnson would pair with Carney and Branch, two figures far outside his normal scene, but he’s always been an open and avid collaborator, working with Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch, Bikini Kill’s Tobi Vail, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Here, the partnership creates a dynamic of friction—upbeat sounds distorted by tremorous vocals—that defines A Wonderful Beast, giving it a tonal depth that rewards repeat listens.
The contrast also adds intriguing ambiguity to even the simplest songs. If delivered earnestly, “Like You Do” could be a pure ballad supported by staccato guitar and swelling keyboards. But Johnson’s wry sing-speak straddles sincerity and sarcasm, sometimes mocking the idea of romantic relationships altogether. The catchy “Wherefore Art Thou” reworks Romeo and Juliet into a snarling cartoon, while good-cop Branch and bad-cop Johnson pit emotional empathy against skepticism during “Another Teardrop Falls.” The oddly political “Bubbles, Clouds and Rainbows” is the album’s most cryptic moment. During dreamy verses and a chorus of “alt, right, click, delete,” Johnson imagines achieving nirvana by eradicating hateful fringes. But the song is so sunny, it’s possible to hear him making the opposite case, too. When he sings ”welcome to our bubble,” it’s as if he were sarcastically admonishing the perils of the opposition’s echo chamber.
Those nuances may make A Wonderful Beast seem tedious or heavy-going, but it’s actually quite entertaining. The tunes Johnson wrote with Carney teem with hooks, and Carney’s production has the spirit of a poppy garage session. Some songs are even best enjoyed at the surface, as with “Are We Ready,” which begins with Johnson crooning “What does it mean to shing-a-ling?” He extols the utopian magic of simple pleasures on “When the Weekend Comes Around.” “All the problems solve themselves/When the weekend comes around,” he sings over a pulsing New Order-esque bassline. “When the weekend comes around/Is when the records spin around.”
Sunny sentiments mixed with darker hues was a hallmark of one of Beat Happening’s best albums, Black Candy, a title that applies to Johnson’s approach to music in general. A Wonderful Beast is too overtly engaging for a pitch-black album cover, instead using a colorful portrait of Johnson by Mecca Normal’s Jean Smith to capture the singer’s peculiar allure. A Wonderful Beast shows again how Johnson’s voice adds layers of meaning to his music—and how he’s kept that skill fresh by finding new ways to deploy it, and new people to help.


The Detroit rapper Dej Loaf came to national attention with "Try Me", an icy song dedicated to keeping one's personal circle small. Her new EP jumps smoothly between rapping and singing, and is just as confident and contained. She is aloof, but she never shuts herself off so much to miss when real attraction might be coming her way.

#AndSeeThatsTheThing EP

Last year, the Detroit rapper Dej Loaf came to national attention with “Try Me”, an icy song dedicated to keeping one's personal circle small. The sentiment isn't too dissimilar from plenty of “us against the world” street rap songs, but Dej’s sweet hook and relatively unknown status gave the song an extra push. She arrived aloof, an emotion that gains currency as social networks proliferate and push themselves into every corner of our lives. People can buy followers, beef between superstars can start over tweets, and it is harder and harder to opt out of any of it. Dej’s latest EP may indulge in this world—see the hashtag inclusion in the EP's title #AndSeeThatsTheThing—but her default remains disinterest.
On the EP’s opening track “Desire,” Dej says “I’d rather feel on myself than let you feel on my ass,” and the rest of the EP is just as self-contained and confident. The Big Sean-assisted “Back Up,” one of the most upbeat tracks in Dej’s catalog, focuses on keeping the distance with someone after just one night together. Big Sean, someone with a very public and on the record relationship history, struggles to keep up with Dej’s cold-hearted dismissals (“If I fuck and make you come, you gotta promise not to stress me,” she insists). But she never shuts herself off so much to miss when real attraction might be coming her way. “Butterflies” refers to the little creatures that flutter in nervous stomachs, and it captures the cheeks-blushing sweetness that is the other side of Dej. On “Hey There,” Dej partners with Future—more recently a heel on Dirty Sprite 2—who rediscovers his softer side that won over fans a few years ago with “Turn on the Lights”.
Dej Loaf’s confidence extends to her production. She knows the particular sound that works for her mix of rap and R&B. The EP’s production stays laidback, so Dej can smoothly jump between singing and rapping without leaning too heavily towards one style. “Back Up” is the exception, a crisp straight-ahead rap song that forgoes genre blurring. Though Dej’s talent is walking both sides of that divide, she’s a strong enough singer and rapper that it’s great hearing her not stuck on instrumentals that straddle the genre fence.
The performative nature of muting people from one’s life isn't seeking true isolation, but being selective about who is allowed into one’s world. Whether it is a passerby on the street, dudes creeping into DMs, or the comment section of Instagram, there are always so many voices shouting. The response of Dej’s music to pull inward feels appropriate, to only open up when most tender. #AndSeeThatsTheThing might sound so sad today, but Dej appears comfortably dour.


For the last two years, Greg Fox has worked with a dozen projects, but his name has been chased by one thorny apposition: (ex-Liturgy). With two new releases, Guardian Alien’s near-brilliant second LP and a collaboration with jazz pioneer Milford Graves, he may have finally drummed himself past parenthetical suffixation.

Guardian Alien / Greg Fox: Spiritual Emergency / Mitral Transmission

At last, Greg Fox might’ve drummed himself past parenthetical suffixation. For the last two years, the wildly prolific Fox has worked with a dozen projects, from his own electronic rampages as GDFX to the spirited explorations of the improvisation-and-academia sublimation squad Zs. There’ve been stints with the drum militia Man Forever and the arid punk band Cy Dune, treks with garage weirdos PC Worship and sets with stylistic jester C. Spencer Yeh. But through most all of this, Fox’s name has been chased by one thorny apposition: (ex-Liturgy). For all the talk of treatises and transcendentalism, Fox was Liturgy’s locomotive, powering their metal with his relentless and intricate drumming. Fox hasn’t been in the band since October 2011, but the association is just now, at last, beginning to peel from his side.
In large part, Fox’s name has begun to hold sway without that former association because he’s just so goddamn busy—the aforementioned are only a sample of his manifold projects since leaving Liturgy. More important than accretion, though, has been the excellence of his Guardian Alien, the wild-eyed, open-ended troupe that emerged just before Fox split with Liturgy. Guardian Alien couples Alexandra Drewchin’s spasmodic vocals and electronics and Turner Williams’ electrified Indian zither, the shahai baaja, with a daunting power trio—Fox on drums, surrounded by bassist Eli Winograd, and former Liturgy guitarist Bernard Gann. Their debut LP, the one track See the World Given to a One Love Entity, recalled Fox’s recent past only through the force of the rhythms—primal, knotty cataracts spilling over refracted dub and jazz, noise and abstraction. It was a primer for Guardian Alien’s broad musical reach, suggesting a group whose interests were as wide as the psychedelic sky above. It was, in earnest, the start of Fox’s post-Liturgy liberation, a process that reaches its next phase with a pair of new LPs—Guardian Alien’s near-brilliant second LP, Spiritual Emergency, and Mitral Transmission, a wonderful and ponderous collaboration between Fox and jazz pioneer Milford Graves.
Spiritual Emergency follows the noble freak/free music tradition of pitting one or several sides of short takes against one sidelong epic. The album’s first half links four divergent improvisations, while Guardian Alien commits the flip to an extended, excited span that starts near silence and ends in paroxysmal explosion. The structural decision places Guardian Alien in an idiomatic continuum that includes John Coltrane, Patty Watters, Frank Zappa, Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Amon Düül II. It also spotlights the band’s admirable willingness to tinker with most anything: That first side includes a duet for chopped-and-stacked samples and percussion that might recall the Books and an electric guitar drone that stretches and then drifts into the distance, like Bardo Pond on a lunch break. “Mirror” is a drum-and-noise tirade that mirrors Lightning Bolt, while opener “Tranquilizer” bounds between rhythms and samples, effects and instruments like a warm-up jam from the salad days of Gang Gang Dance or Black Dice. That tizzy of activity and references, mind you, happens in an erratic 20 minutes—not enough time for any of the ideas to congeal into something greater or for the pieces to feel like more than loose leaves from the Guardian Alien’s collective notebook. Momentarily intriguing but never quite transfixing, they are exercises in exercising.
Their slightness comes in bas-relief to the audacious title track, the new pinnacle of Guardian Alien’s limited output. “Spiritual Emergency” begins with a reading by Stanislav Grof from Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes A Crisis, a book that argues for working through freak-outs of faith rather than treating them like mental illness. Guardian Alien takes the idea as precept here, rising and falling in and out of momentum and confusion. They struggle to keep the rhythm and find the groove, to build from basic ideas into something grand. Drewchin’s voice drifts like a ghoulish invocation. Gann winds through the hyperactivity with a sterling desert-blues riffs, daring the quintet to follow him into the distance. They do for a bit, idling into a land of jam-band torpor just ahead of the 16-minute mark. But it’s a feint: All at once, the band bursts forward, drums and voices and guitars surging into the ecstasy of volume. It’s a new peak for Guardian Alien, a breakthrough that shows their ability to be mutually focused and wild, composed and chaotic. It’s exhilarating, liberating stuff, a deserving entry in the sidelong canon it follows.
As with “Spiritual Emergency”, Mitral Transmission succeeds because of its singular direction and focus. For years, Milford Graves—the border-defiant drummer, medicine man, scientist, and theoretician who played on many ESP Disk albums that shape Guardian Alien’s larger aesthetic—has recorded and analyzed the heart beats of musicians in his Queens basement laboratory. “His heart research can help anyone,” wrote New York’s Mark Jacobson in 2001, “but mostly he works on musicians, ‘so they hear how they sound naturally, let them compare that with what they’re playing.’” Graves invited Fox into his lair for one of these sessions, connecting him to sensors and software that allowed Fox to listen to the beat and pitch of his own body. He used that data as the basis for Mitral Transmission’s four compositions, wondrous instrumentals that fascinate with or without their biosynthetic context.
These tracks float occasionally toward the negative connotations of “new age music,” with long stretches of steel drum radiance, plucked harp patterns, softly pattered rhythms, and nebulous tones that suggest a breeze across a meadow. But the music’s too busy and prickly for somnolence. Just when the motion starts to settle, Fox adds a brief shock of noise or a new trace of rhythm to upset the system ever so slightly. “Heartbeat cycles with asymmetrical time values are more healthy,” Graves once told Wavelength Magazine. “This asymmetry is called the chaotic heartbeat.” Fox’s interlocking meters and melodies shape a pinwheel sort of gamelan, spinning forever into new moments of wonder. Less esoteric than its origins suggest, the music lands somewhere between an acoustic recasting of Four Tet’s coruscant electronica and Matmos’ alien-but-accessible trip.
Mitral Transmission is a fascinating album, then, a would-be footnote that reveals Fox’s willingness to mine most anything for sound. Sometimes, as on the first half of Spiritual Emergency, that process can lead to messy results. But elsewhere, it’s the power pushing Guardian Alien and Fox past their past associations and into a wonderfully strange and unpredictable future.


This heavy and rewarding set of dark, beat-driven ambience gathers three EPs released in 2010 and adds a healthy amount of bonus material.

Tryptych

Demdike Stare is a collaboration between a techno DJ/producer and a dedicated crate-digger for Finders Keepers, one of those boutiquey Euro labels that issues albums of Czech cult-horror soundtracks and Persian funk under gonzo banners like "20 vintage slices of Cymraeg Soft Psych and Welsh Kosmic Pop." The particular digger in question, Sean Canty, was once referred to by Fact magazine as one of Manchester's "best-known record collectors," which is illustrative of the company we're in: People who not only rate records, but rate their collectors. Canty's partner, Miles Whittaker, has been been an associate of Manchester's Modern Love records for nearly 10 years, primarily sticking around the kind of eerie, minimal techno that production groups like Basic Channel developed in the 1990s. Basically, Canty and Whittaker are lifers in communities where darkness and obscurity are tools, not handicaps.
Demdike Stare is primarily a sample-based project, and "dark" is its organizing principle. Their logo is a skull, rose, and triangle; the cover of one of their EPs  is a visual riff on a Ouija board; and they're named after a 17th-century witch-- a quasi-gothic, English variation on the sci-fi and horror imagery that has saturated the American underground over the past couple of years. The tracks on Tryptych are droning and nightmarish: lots of close murmuring and distant wind, lots of groaning earth and quietly whining steam-powered machines, glassy techno keyboards and the buried wailing of undefined tribes. But like some drone (and most minimal techno) there's usually a build or a climax, and one of the most consistently satisfy [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ing things about listening to Tryptych is that it takes music you might expect to be purely ambient and shapes it into something with a hump somewhere in the middle-- something with a narrative to it.
Canty and Whittaker also manage to give their atmospheres rhythmic inertia and shape their beats in ways that make them sound like they're emerging from the track's atmosphere. I'm guessing this comes from Whittaker's time in the world of minimal techno, where the sound of static can pass for a backing track when edited and looped just right. Tryptych's collapsing of background and foreground is a holistic approach that makes their unexpected connections-- between the black ambience of Nurse With Wound, Middle Eastern chant, and minimal techno-- sound seamless and logical*.* The result is a style part-techno, part-drone, part-noise, sometimes European-sounding, sometimes ambiguously "ethnic," part-heavenly, part-hellish-- a kind of map to a musical otherworld.
Demdike Stare's influences are well integrated and their commitment to them feels enduring, and after the deluge of half-kitschy, self-parodying indie-goth bands last year (GL▲SS †33†H was when I got off the bus), the commitment is refreshing. Tryptich is sample-based but doesn't just suss out some particular cultural moment and heap static on top of it, it reaches for a moment-- a confluence of sounds-- that never actually happened. In a blog post on what he called "the new doom," Pitchfork contributor Philip Sherburne wrote that "Demdike Stare are even more deserving of the 'witch house' tag [than Salem], given that they're named for an actual witch and have a deeper connection to actual house music." True, but I have no temptation to belittle Demdike Stare with the term*.*
Tryptych collects the three EPs they released in 2010 and adds 40 minutes of bonus material to them, which ostensibly leaves you with an album that's about two and a half hours long. Two and a half hours is a long time. I'd be lying if I said I had the patience to give it my full attention from start to finish, but the caveat is that I think it's best enjoyed either in small listens or in a kind of absent-minded immersion. It's the kind of thing you can keep turned on but tuned-out-- for bad dreams, adventures into chemical hinterlands, night drives, and so on.
Canty and Whittaker are impressively capable in that respect: they know exactly what will and won't belong in their creepy little mood-worlds, and as a result, Tryptych rarely calls attention to itself. I tried playing it while I slept a few times, and woke up in the middle of the night with a real oh god, what's going on and how can I make it stop feeling, which in this context is an absolute plus. I in fact recommend that you listen to Tryptych at night-- thematically, it's where the album lives and where it thrives.


Foxygen began as two L.A. high school kids obsessed with the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and like their heroes they excel at mixing and matching 1960s and 70s rock touchstones into an appealing and highly referential collage.

Take The Kids Off Broadway

In the old century, the classic-rock canon appealed to a certain kind of music nerd obsessed with order and clarity. In the canon, there was no room for gray areas. The Beatles, Dylan, and the Clash were important because they'd always been important. It was practically a science, with laws that were established on the basis of ancient albums that were similarly well-ordered, with their linear tracklists and agreed-upon contexts. You could argue that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band wasn't actually that great, but this would instantly put you in the flat-earth lunatic fringe. Certain albums were just factually great, which meant your experience with them, even as a newcomer, tended to be fairly rigid and pre-ordained.
The internet, as it tends to do, pretty much put an end to this old way of looking at things. The ability to access any song from any era, instantly, and place it alongside other songs from other eras-- therefore rendering the "official" rock narrative irrelevant-- did a big gravity check on the canon, sending its fussy compendium of carefully curated history spilling in all sorts of erratic directions. Take the Kids Off Broadway, the new EP by recent Jagjaguwar signees Foxygen, is latest product of this DIY context for rock history, and the spillage is as disorienting as ever.
Broadway is fun and boisterous and consciously difficult to discern, like the sugary fuzz stuck between oldies stations. Band members Jonathan Rado and Sam France have been honing this sound for seven years, starting off as L.A. high school kids obsessed with the Brian Jonestown Massacre. (They're also big admirers of singer-songwriter-producer Richard Swift, who gets a shout-out in Broadway's closer, "Middle School Dance".) The guys in Foxygen made 10 records together before unofficially splitting off to attend college, but they remained on the same musical page as they entered their 20s. Finally, they returned to the Foxygen fold to make a series of independently released EPs, including Broadway, which originally came out last year.
France and Rado beg, borrow, and steal from 20th-century legends in uniquely 21st-century ways, deconstructing their favorite Stones, Bowie, and Lou Reed records and brazenly re-assembling those elements into free-wheeling songs that melt old sounds into weird, wild shapes. Why reference Their Satanic Majesties Request when you can touch on every 1960s Stones album, plus every other classic record you've just downloaded, in the space of a single song? On Broadway, Foxygen's music sounds like a stack of eight-tracks that's been left out in the sun too long.
While Broadway touches on territory similar to that previously mined by Ariel Pink and MGMT, Foxygen approach psych-pop revivalism with the cram-it-all enthusiasm of teenagers discovering rock-music staples for the first time. Coupled with a muscular virtuosity that belies Foxygen's bedroom pop roots, Broadway transforms familiar ingredients into unpredictable, even unwieldy music. Sometimes France and Rado lift melodies wholesale, like the interpolation of "Ruby Tuesday" into "Abandon My Toys", or the snippet of Los Bravos' 60s pop chestnut "Black Is Black" into the title track. Other times they make up their own timeless melodies in order to twist and subvert them, like on "Make It Known", the closest thing to a straightforward song on Broadway, which starts off as a lounge-singer synth-rock ballad that's buffeted by a free-form horn section and English music hall-style theatricality. The 10-minute "Teenage Alien Blues" is the purest distillation of the Foxygen aesthetic, marrying the drone-y dread of the Doors with the lysergic freakouts of the Flaming Lips before heading recklessly though detours into psychedelic Motown soul and *Bitches Brew-*inspired voodoo spaciness.
Foxygen haven't so much produced memorable songs as much as cool, disembodied sonic layers that might one day coalesce into memorable songs in your head if you listen to it enough. Whether this approach is more refined on the upcoming full-length due early next year remains to be seen. But Broadway suggests that Foxygen have found a patch of untamed wilderness in the midst of otherwise well-trod territory. Offering neither clarity nor order, but very much the opposite, Foxygen see exciting possibilities in these disjointed times.


The Canadian art-pop artist's debut album is as much a product of his time in Montreal and Toronto's DIY scenes as it is influenced by their predecessors in Brooklyn and Baltimore. But Lesser Evil is primarily rooted in Airick Woodhead's dystopian imagination.

Lesser Evil

Moving to Montreal from Toronto a few years ago drew Doldrums (aka Airick Woodhead) into one of the most exciting art pop scenes of the past few years, home to Grimes, tourmates Purity Ring, D'Eon, and others. His debut album Lesser Evil is in large part the product of those cities' DIY/noise scenes, where Woodhead came up throwing warehouse parties. His addictive single "Egypt", however, nods toward earlier such scenes in Brooklyn (Black Dice, Gang Gang Dance) and Baltimore (Dan Deacon): It's cacophonous and polyrhythmic, continuously falling apart and putting itself back together. Just when it appears ready to implode from hyperactivity, the song erupts into an unearthly refrain, no doubt designed to link a mass of partiers into a temporary, euphoric community.
Yet the name "Egypt" signals that Evil is primarily rooted in Woodhead's active imagination. The Doldrums project started as pure science fiction, with Woodhead picturing drugged patients in an experimental clinic who started sharing "dream maps," which lead to "this extremely fucked up, dystopic place in which everyone's wildest, darkest fantasies are being realized." We're introduced to this scenario on "Anomaly", as he asks: "Are you living out your fantasy/ Or caught in someone else’s dreams?" The track's gothic atmospheres and pulsating electronic rhythms link it to Crystal Castles, another Toronto duo similarly prone to creating soundworlds with no fixed address. "Holographic Sandcastles" takes this approach to its endpoint: Woodhead finds himself face-to-face with a fellow traveler "10 miles underground, an ocean over our heads now" amidst an echo-laden soundscape.
Evil is equally borne of Woodhead's skill at channeling the infinite possibilities of digital production and the countless distractions of online life. That "fucked up, dystopic" site of wild, dark fantasies? Some of us call it "the internet." The most talked-about pre-release story surrounding Evil has been that Woodhead compiled it on a laptop borrowed from his pal Claire Boucher, then featured that laptop's busted monitor on the album cover. It's the perfect metaphor for Woodhead's brand of jittery maximalism; it's easy to imagine him climbing inside, pushing it to its absolute limit, then posing next to the rubble when he was done. Out of this scorched earth M.O. arises Evil's most massive song, "She Is the Wave". It's less than three minutes long, but every second is packed airtight with laser stabs, spiraling synth squeals, and dark sub-bass. (And yes, there is an internal organ-rearranging "drop" a few seconds in.) Bass is one of the album's most recommendable sonic traits: for all of Woodhead's tweaked-out, non-linear layering, he pays a lot of attention to low end.
Among the sensory overload, there's a strong sense of naïve romanticism unique to a kid in his early 20s. Much will likely be made of Woodhead's androgynous vocal style, but primarily, it just sounds young, the kind of wide-eyed enthusiasm perfect for a guy who named his musical project after a fantasy world. These songs sound complex, but lyrically they're mostly about simple things that we fixate on when we're young: love, identity, escape. On the title track, the album's highlight, Woodhead grabs a fellow traveler and splits from a world of his own creation-- because it's boring, like the Doldrums in in The Phantom Tollbooth that gave his project its name. They don't know what they want to do, or where they want to go, they just want to get there quickly. As the squealing synth melody driving the song turns into a howl during its last third, Woodhead starts chanting a refrain that kids have relied upon for centuries, and which is axiomatic for Evil as a whole: "If I don't see it, it's not there."


Byran Müller’s latest LP plays like a guided tour of his catalog. It’s some of his warmest and most inviting music to date.

Resort

Before he was Skee Mask, Bryan Müller was SCNTST. Monday, the Munich producer’s debut EP, is straightforward and delirious, full of tightly wound grooves and head-spinning change-ups; it rockets between electro, ghettotech, juke, and techno, each track containing as many ideas as it does drum patterns. With that EP, Müller was looking less toward science than alchemy—an approach that proved indicative. As Skee Mask, Müller has spent the past decade combining dance-music histories in all sorts of beguiling ways: dubbed-out hardgroove techno, fleet-footed drum ’n’ bass and bone-chilling ambience, psychedelic and minimalistic IDM. Resort, the electronic producer’s latest LP, may be his most potent distillation yet. Here, he makes his club-ready approach to historiography clear, crumpling up timelines and sketching out a universe.
While particular details change from record to record, Müller’s tunes often harbor a similar feeling: It is heart-on-sleeve and tough at once, every drum landing with an icy precision and each keyboard stretching towards the skies. Even as he pans from one genre to another, that emotive approach serves as his bedrock. His music sits at the intersections of breakbeats, ambient music, and techno; over the years, he’s become so adept behind the boards that any seams are more or less invisible. His catalog is equally suited for basement raves, 4 a.m. highways, and sun-drenched afternoons—pitch the bass accordingly and you’re good to go. Resort takes full advantage of this range, playing like a guided tour of Müller’s catalog, each kick drum landing with the quiet intimacy of a familiar heartbeat.
Part of the thrill of Resort is in watching Müller stretch out a bit, exploring new territories by revisiting old traditions. In doing so, he offers up some of his warmest and most inviting music to date, giving his always-precise drum programming a sepia-tinged hue. In its best moments, the LP sounds beamed in from a slightly different universe, one in which Warp and Rephlex never left the mid-’90s and every sample arrived blanketed in a thin layer of dust. “BB Care,” thanks to its ramshackle drums, dreamy synth pads, and barely there vocal samples, feels like a forgotten bonus track from Music Has the Right to Children. “Hölzl Was a Dancer,” a house-music stomper with shuffle-and-skip drums and an acrobatic bassline, might have lit up dancefloors in 1992. The hazy synth workout “Hedwig Transformation Group” recalls GAS at his most blissed-out, while “Waldmeister” displays Müller’s ambient-techno chops, with sun-dappled synthesizers gleaming amid groaning bass.
For all its retro-leaning references, Resort is hardly shackled to the past. It is a series of clever and subtle reimaginings, fusing new-school and genre-agnostic approaches to electronic music with vintage textures. (A few track titles—“Nostaglitch,” “Reminiscrmx”—cheekily underline this idea.) Squint and you’ll notice shards of juke and footwork underneath the lullaby-soft synthesizers of “Daytime Gamer,” and “Element,” which sits somewhere between acid, breaks, and ambient music, sounds like something that might play as sun fills the Nowadays dancefloor. Skee Mask has never been an aesthetic purist, exactly—that first SCNTST EP twisted DJ Assault’s speaker-busting “Ass N Titties” into a psychedelic sort-of-techno brain-bender—but he clearly understands the power of tweaking familiar idioms. Resort, with its blissed-out breakbeats, lucid-dream techno, and gauzy downtempo, is both a quiet flex and an ode to umpteen dance-music histories.


Balancing vaporwave’s glossy kitsch with throat-shredding metal vocals and labyrinthine sound collage, Angel Marcloid’s music is a perfect fusion of pop and pure abstraction.

Fire-Toolz: Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace)

Angel Marcloid is no stranger to chaos: Her labels Swamp Circle and Rainbow Bridge brim with glitchy noise and scrambled vaporwave. But the music the Chicago multi-instrumentalist makes as Fire-Toolz has always been too meticulous to simply coast on entertaining randomness. Slapping MIDI basslines, screamed metal vocals, video-game synths, riffing guitars, and proggy drum fills might all collide in any given song, but Marcloid’s instrumentally and mathematically virtuosic constructions never feel simply thrown together. The highwire balancing act of all these wildly moving parts has always been Fire-Toolz’s calling card, and on the brilliant new Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace) it reaches a whole new level of thrilling intensity.
Marcloid’s compositional approach has often felt clearer when she narrows her stylistic parameters slightly. Projects like the sample-based Mindspring Memories or the jazz-fusion Nonlocal Forecast, beautifully captured on Bubble Universe! for Hausu Mountain earlier this year, show how well Marcloid can hone in on a specific musical idea and reveal an entire world. On the other hand, Fire-Toolz has always been an opportunity for Marcloid to spin every plate in her cupboard at once. Until now, the alias has felt especially influenced by metal, due to the perfectly honed black-metal hiss she unleashes over many tracks. Here she drastically reins those vocals in, but by pulling back on the most striking element of Fire-Toolz, she lifts everything else in her arsenal. It makes Field Whispers feel like an evolution of the project as a whole.
Field Whispers opens with what might be the best vocal song Marcloid has ever written. Despite its long, unwieldy name, “mailto:spasm@swamp.god?subject=Mind-BodyParallels” distills Fire-Toolz’s sonic obsessions into a strange approximation of pop music. Its web of bouncing drum-machine beats and bright keyboard melodies sparkles alongside throat-shredding screams. Even through this web of smooth guitar lines and funky synths, Marcloid’s bile-dripping roar locks right in without ever sounding out of place, charting a path from easy listening Muzak to a cathartic finale that surges as fiercely as Agalloch. “Mailto:” is followed by its opposite, the sprawling seven-minute sound collage “Clear Light,” but each of that track’s carefully sculpted left turns, from harsh noise to ambient to surging synths and a twisting guitar solo, shows that Marcloid’s experimental flourishes are as carefully considered and exciting as her pop songs. It sounds like Oneohtrix Point Never’s last three albums played simultaneously. Prior to the album’s release, the two songs were combined into a single nine-minute single, which seems unwieldy until you realize it makes complete sense. Nothing has captured this nearly indescribable project better than jumping on these two sonic roller-coasters back to back.
Those songs recalibrate Fire-Toolz’s framework, creating a playing field where Field Whispers’ leaps into pop and dives into abstraction are equally rewarding. The hallucinatory sound design of “The Warm-Body (A Blessing & Removal)” unpredictably shifts into a tender melodic coda; “Hologram of a Composite” feels like a momentary return to Nonlocal Forecast’s proggy, euphoric Bubble Universe!; and “✓ BEiNG” begins with birdsong and forest ambience before igniting with stadium-sized drums, a soaring guitar solo, and another surprising swoop of the ground-razing vocals that opened “mailto.” It’s a welcome return to Marcloid’s voice, which gets a third and final showcase on the ecstatic closer, “Smiling at Sunbears Grooming in Sunbeams” (along with Marcloid’s late cat, Breakfast, to whom the album is dedicated). It all makes Field Whispers Marcloid’s strongest statement under any moniker, a reaffirmation of her work as a wild playground where anything can happen—and usually does.


The second album from the rapidly ascendent synth-pop star Garrett Borns offers more of the same: great ideas constrained in songs that rarely allow them to come to fruition.

Blue Madonna

If you’ve encountered any commercials in the past couple years, you’ve likely heard “Electric Love,” off of Garrett Borns’ synthy 2015 album Dopamine. Even if you haven’t, you could probably guess it came from an ad for something or other. Such is the nature of the beast: acts that combine synth-pop and rock and a not-overly-generous spritz of funk, straining to be liked by as many people as possible, commissioned and talked about in terms of utility: “could slot in a playlist or festival lineup alongside MGMT and Currents-era Tame Impala.”
Blue Madonna, BØRNS’ follow-up to Dopamine, differs from its predecessor mostly by having a less atrocious cover. Where Dopamine boasted big-name producers like Jeff Bhasker and Emile Haynie, Blue Madonna only brings back one, Tommy English (Ladyhawke, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness). But the expensive sheen with which he coats most of the tracks here makes these songs more or less indistinguishable. Mirroring the turn toward gloom in pop on and just outside the charts, Borns said earlier this year the album came out of a “melancholy feeling of departure,” but while there certainly are breakup songs, they’re nothing that’d harsh a festival crowd too much. And like all of Borns’ work, Blue Madonna’s main value over replacement synth-pop is his falsetto, capable of reaching a glam-rock frenzy but constrained in songs that never quite allow him to go there.
Another difference: a guest artist, Lana Del Rey, with whom Borns shares a couple ideas about aesthetics and the moody side of L.A. Unfortunately, while Lana’s been surprisingly lively on other guest spots, Borns got her at her most soporific, and the two are rather bloodless for a track called “God Save Our Young Blood.” At almost four minutes, it’s no longer than anything else on the album, but it feels endless. Similarly languid is “Second Night of Summer,” basically a classed-up Maroon 5 song. They even crash and skid at the exact same part of the chorus: Levine with “motherfucker,” Borns with a “throwing me that shade like I’m not cool enough.” (Mourn, once again, the loss of Shade Court.)
Better are the likes of the synth buzz of “Faded Heart,” however canned, or the rock riffs of “We Don’t Care,” though they’ve gone through so much processing they’re practically taxidermied, or the surprisingly decent groove of “Iceberg,” although once it gets going it abruptly stops. And for a genre that’s by definition safe, Blue Madonna does have one pleasant surprise: “Supernatural” features a theremin interlude by self-taught virtuoso Armen Ra. “I feel like he crash-landed into the album from his star,” Borns said earlier this month. “I had to summon him from the cosmos.” He’s not wrong; the bridge is sumptuous, given all the room it needs, and made of totally different stuff than the rest of the album. It’s a glimpse, however fleeting, of the album that might result if BØRNS spent as much time teasing out the weirdness in his ideas as smoothing out the wrinkles in his luxe suit.


In drifting arrangements for saxophone, keyboards, and contemplative vocals, the trio invents a singular style of shipwrecked yacht rock that’s well suited to the strange pace of 2020.

Shabason, Krgovich & Harris: Philadelphia

Joseph Shabason, Nicholas Krgovich, and Chris Harris’ Philadelphia owes less to the American metropolis than to a song about it. To complement the ethereal soft rock they recorded together over three days in Toronto last fall, the Canadian trio opted to cover Neil Young’s 1993 hymn “Philadelphia,” which originally appeared on the soundtrack for Jonathan Demme’s namesake AIDS-themed drama, but was largely overshadowed by Bruce Springsteen’s Grammy-winning “Streets of Philadelphia” single from the same film. The song is a classic Neil alone-at-the-microphone tearjerker, a private prayer for the City of Brotherly Love to live up to its nickname during a moment of weakness and loneliness. That plea for community struck a deep chord with the trio, who decided to make their “Philadelphia” cover the title track on a record rooted in familial bonhomie and mutual support.
In one sense, Shabason, Krgovich & Harris’ Philadelphia is a faded snapshot of a pre-COVID world. But if the project’s origin story seems blissfully removed from the world of political tumult, pandemic anxiety, and endless doomscrolling that we inhabit today, the record is also uncannily timely; you’d be hard-pressed to find an album that more vividly conjures the equally disorienting and liberating effects of putting your life on pause. This is the sound of your brain on lockdown: You’re languishing in your apartment for days on end and losing all sense of time and place, yet you’re noticing wondrous new details in things you’ve stared at a million times before, and finding pride and purpose in the most menial of daily routines.
Shabason is no stranger to exploring these sorts of Zen states. As a guest saxophonist for Destroyer and the War on Drugs (and prolific composer in his own right), he has helped steer indie rock into smoother waters over the past decade, blurring the lines between adult-contemporary pop and avant-garde experimentation. On Philadelphia, Shabason, Krgovich & Harris arrive at their own singular style of shipwrecked yacht-rock, retaining all the shimmering surfaces but trading any wave-crashing forward motion for free floatation. They let these songs drift wherever they need to go, as the glassy synth tones, wandering piano lines, and fluttering flutes accumulate around the melodies like so much water-logged debris. Like their compatriot Sandro Perri, Shabason, Krgovich & Harris understand the fine art of unhurried busyness, maintaining a calm sense of stasis even as their surroundings change considerably.
While Philadelphia is of a piece with Shabason’s past work, it’s somewhat uncharted territory for Vancouver singer/songwriter Krgovich, who over the past two decades has cultivated a reputation as a wry romantic in the Stephin Merritt/Jens Lekman mold. (Harris—who plays guitar, synth, and percussion here—has occasionally served as his sideman over the years, dating back to Krgovich’s late-2000s outfit, No Kids.) Philadelphia provides an especially stark point of contrast to Krgovich’s most recent solo release, “Ouch”, which chronicled a real-life breakup in discomfiting detail. But on Philadelphia, he relishes the opportunity to free himself from traditional verse/chorus/verse songwriting; he also redirects the gaze away from his personal life to the world around him, delivering his lyrics with all the patient poeticism of Bill Callahan returning from a yoga retreat.
Over the wind-chime synths of “Osouji,” Krgovich gradually unfurls a song that’s both as mundane and profound as the annual Japanese house-cleaning ritual for which it’s named: “Moving furniture, wiping baseboards, the radio on,” he details; “I’m seeing things that have been here/And considering them.” From there, he talks us through the rest of his day, right up to his pre-bedtime rituals, until he actually drifts off before completing the song’s final verse (“Falling asleep at night, falling ahhhhh…”). It’s a reminder that even the most uneventful days are a gift. But if “Osouji” is a day-in-the-life chronicle, then the epic “I Don’t See the Moon” is pure dreamtime wonderment, harnessing the glacial pace, open space, and jazzy informality of late-period Talk Talk into an eight-minute swoon.
Philadelphia abounds with these moments of intense contemplation and quiet rapture, and their celestial, sax-sweetened version of Neil’s namesake track fits snugly into its meditative milieu. But the album finds its clearest philosophical articulation in “Friday Afternoon,” an ambient serenade that’s part ’80s lite-FM ballad, part pedal-steeled Lynchian torch song. Stuck in a traffic jam caused by “a dusty mini-van with the hood flipped up,” Krgovich redirects his attention from this “frazzled moment” to gaze at the “pretty sunset” before introducing the song’s oft-repeated motivational mantra: “Wrap your loving arms around it!” As relaxed as it sounds, Philadelphia is also a useful tool for confronting the drama of modern life. Embracing the world with loving arms might also mean grappling with its chaos, but it’s all a means of better appreciating everything that’s still beautiful about it.


The latest in a line of fine Swedish pop exports, Lykke Li's debut album-- which, although it seems like it's been around forever, is only just now out in the UK with a U.S. release to finally come this summer-- was produced and co-written by Björn Yttling of Peter Björn and John.

Youth Novels

Sweden has found a niche for itself as the backroom of modern pop. Its production teams provide the engineers for global Top 40 sounds; in men like Jens Lekman and Johan Agebjörn it produces theorists of pop classicism; and its own top-sellers, like Robyn and now Lykke Li, are welcomed into collections which otherwise carefully sidestep the commercial. So it's not wholly surprising that Youth Novels, Li's first full-length album, has the air of the workshop about it. The careful, spartan production-- by Bjorn Yttling of Peter Björn and John-- asks listeners to do more work than most pop records allow for. At its frequent best, the record manages to sketch out widescreen hit songs with a remarkable economy of means. At its more occasional worst, the tracks feel frustratingly underthought.
The foundation for the successful songs tends to be voice and bass: the bass thick with reverb, the voice cute and close-up. Around this Yttrling-- who co-writes all the tracks-- places other instruments: splashes of piano or woodblock, petite guitar phrases, keyboard buzzes. The trick-- and they pull it off over and over again-- is to bring all the elements together on the chorus for a big hooky payoff. Of course for this to work they need strong choruses-- "I'm Good, I'm Gone", "Let It Fall", "Hanging High", and others provide them. Standout "Dance Dance Dance" has one of the stickiest refrains on the album, and one of the most audacious instrumental builds-- close-mic'ed bass, tippy-tappy percussion, and then suddenly a cheeky sax nudging its way into the track and scrapping puppyishly around its edges. If you don't smile at that, Lykke Li is probably not for you.
With so many surprises in the arrangements, you might overlook what a strength Li herself is, how well she unifies Youth Novels' scattershot imagination. It's easy to dismiss her style as overly cutesy-- the babytalk chorus on first single "Little Bit", for instance-- and her fragility can seem annoyingly affected. But don't be fooled-- she's in total command of the songs, and her breathy fuzziness fits the wireframe aesthetic better than a fuller voice would. There are also hints that Li would be as happy with a richer sound-- on the beautiful "My" she's rolled and washed by cymbal, string, and echo and lets them envelop her without erasing her.
Not all experiments work though, and when realizing ideas is less important than having them you're entering a slightly dangerous area. Li gives you fair warning that she'll do what she wants-- opener "Melodies and Desires" is ornamentally lovely but you won't linger long on its spoken-word philosophies. Even so, when her judgement fails to match her talent it can be painful going. Electro trudge "Complaint Department" in particular is dreary and grating enough to risk throwing your faith in the whole project off-beam: It doesn't help that Li can't remotely bring the venom the song needs. Thankfully she follows it with "Breaking It Up", one of her most vigorous and likeable tracks, whose blend of multi-tracked squawks and wandering synthesisers make for one of the album's most joyful moments.
Chart music today is often so gloriously maximal that reproducing any of its thrills on limited means can seem an impossible task. By paying attention to detail, Yttling and Li's prove that doesn't have to be the case. But even more impressive is the way their intimate, playful miniatures capture the daring and novelty of modern pop, as well as its hooks.