Emo. If you've been reading our site for long enough, you should be behaviorally conditioned to recoil in fear ...

Make Up the Breakdown

Emo. If you've been reading our site for long enough, you should be behaviorally conditioned to recoil in fear from the word, crawl under your computer desk, and assume the grade-school tornado warning position. Nothing brings out the Pitchfork Ginsu like some earnest musical diary-reading, especially if it's from loyal sponsor Vagrant. One thing I'll grant the Vagrant crowd, though, is good sportsmanship; cheers, mates.
One problem-- and I only feel comfortable telling you this after many months of loyal service-- but yeah, I like some emo. The problem lies in the definition, I guess, since "emo" has a Supreme Court pornography kind of definition; one knows it when one sees it. Emo to me is not so much the three-chord pop riffing of the Get Up Kids or the overpassionate nobody-loves-me preciousness of new-schoolers like Dashboard Confessional, but instead the mid-90s Midwestern scene of bands with a recipe of rhythmic complexity, hardcore/post-punk sensibility co-existing uneasily with anthemic tunefulness, and a tendency to moan about the womenfolk. Hey, the wintry climate of Middle America produces a lot of sensitive dorks, your humble narrator included.
It's these emo-for-lack-of-a-better-term bands (Braid, the Promise Ring's first album, Joan of Arc, and even Rainer Maria) that I fess up to occasionally dusting off for a Saturday afternoon, and pleasingly, they seem to be maintaining some semblance of influence beyond the dumbed-down nu-emo. First there was Pretty Girls Make Graves with their Braid + A Girl! formula, and now comes Canada's Hot Hot Heat, whose sound, lyrics, and album title set off my emo alarm, but in a manner gleefully free of embarrassment.
Of course, the emo label is only one of many arbitrary genre ornaments to hang on Hot Hot Heat; one could equally focus in on their new-wave Attractions fetish for Hammond organ or their post-punk urgency and off-kilter progressions. But if the Canuck quartet resembles anyone, it's Dismemberment Plan circa Emergency & I: insistent, poppy music superbly summarizing most of the melodic states punk rock has evolved through since its invention.
So even if Make Up the Breakdown contains a lyric like "bandages on my legs and my arms from you," there's no navel-gazing to be found, unless you can stay focused on your belly button while spastically thrashing about the room. Breakdown launches with a trio of energetic flashes: "Naked in the City Again" setting the nervous tone with a cymbal groove and jagged guitar; "No, Not Now" traipsing through a series of irresistibly catchy segments; "Get In or Get Out" exploding at one point into an organ freakout during which you can almost hear the keys flying off.
By now you'll have surely noticed singer Steve Bays' voice, and therein lies the swing point of your Hot Hot Heat enjoyment. Rarely pausing for more than a breath, Bays flips violently around the range, speeding up and slowing down to match the stop/starts and time signature fuckery of his bandmates. It's the kind of performance that can either obscure your enjoyment of the entire album (as it did for my esteemed colleague Eric Carr in his review of the band's Knock Knock Knock EP), or enliven the experience as a seeming nod to crazed post-punk vocalists like David Byrne and Wire's Colin Newman. For me, it's the latter-- the voice initially seemed a major flaw atop these otherwise incredibly solid rockers, but by the fourth track I'd dropped my defenses, and now find it gives these tracks the character and caffeinated energy they deserve.
No matter your feelings on the mic work, though, you can't help but notice the musical talent at play here, be it in the unusual song structures or the unobtrusive, color-adding use of the organ behind Dante DeCaro's unpredictable chords. "Oh, Goddamnit" borrows more than messy hair from Is This It? with its tik-tak drumming and poppy bass, but Bays' enthusiasm on the hook is an improvement on the Strokes' studied ennui. "This Town" deftly refuses to allow for standard toe-tapping while remaining singalongable, and "Talk to Me, Dance with Me" features an urgent Latin shuffle that amazingly (given that we're dealing with a north-of-the-border band here) skirts awkwardness.
Make Up the Breakdown still has its weaker moments-- the overlong "In Cairo" or the awkward Long Beach reggae bridge of "Bandages" in particular-- indicating that Hot Hot Heat's peak might be in the gotta-wear-shades future rather than the present. Still, there's no reason Breakdown couldn't put Hot Hot Heat on the national stage-- the band's accessible enough on top of their inventiveness to be a feminine facial structure or two away from superstardom. In the meantime, revel in the rare emo-inflected album that won't earn admonishment from us Pitchforkers.


For his second release as Sinoia Caves, Black Mountain's Jeremy Schmidt has rearranged his work on the score for the cult sci-fi film Beyond the Black Rainbow to craft a work that alludes to the movie but should work for people who’ve never even heard of the film. Schmidt seems to have composed this music based on hazy memories of old soundtracks, with sly nods to John Carpenter and Goblin, Jan Hammer and Jon McCallum.

Sinoia Caves: Beyond the Black Rainbow OST

Beyond the Black Rainbow OST

As a kid growing growing up on Vancouver Island, Panos Cosmatos spent hours at his local video store, which was then still a new kind of business in North American suburbia. He would browse the endless racks of VHS boxes, especially curious about the fantastical illustrations that lined the horror and science fiction sections. His mother and father (a cinematographer and director whose most famous credits are Rambo: First Blood Part II and Tombstone) wouldn’t let him watch scary movies, but as Cosmatos told Filmmaker Magazine, he would “spend hours looking at the box covers… just imagining my own versions of them.” Decades later, those made-up stories would eventually coalesce into his first feature-length film, 2010’s Beyond the Black Rainbow, a mesmerizing period-piece headtrip sci-fi horror thriller that inevitably became a cult favorite.
As origin stories go, that’s a good one. And it’s borne out by the film itself, which borrows liberally from the past but proves less specifically referential than, say, any Tarantino flick. On first viewing Beyond the Black Rainbow seems visually arresting yet thematically vacuous: The story crawls, yet (or because) each frame is meticulously composed and shot. There’s a strange doctor treating a young woman who is so sedated she can barely speak and whose long, black hair obscures her face to give her the appearance of a j-horror wraith. There’s the suspicious Arboria Institute, straight out of a Cronenberg flick; there are red stormtroopers called sentionauts, two doomed heshers, and the coolest Lotus Esprit since The Spy Who Loved Me. On repeated viewings, however, all of these fantastical elements begin to push forward certain themes—generally, an older generation preying on a younger one. More specifically, it seems to locate the roots of the present generation’s addiction to mood-altering drugs in the Baby Boomer’s pursuit of enlightenment through mind-altering hallucinogens.
Because the film delivers so much of its information visually rather than through expository dialogue—a trick more filmmakers should try—the music must be both bold and nonintrusive, gingerly reinforcing the imaginary 1983 milieu without rendering it as novelty. Working under his Sinoia Caves alias, Jeremy Schmidt has crafted a soundtrack that nods to the early VHS era but is never too specific in its nostalgia; this is music made to tell a story, or at least part of one. Schmidt, a member of the Canadian indie-prog outfit Black Mountain, knows this territory well: In 2002 he released his Sinoia Caves debut, The Enchanter Persuaded, which expertly mixed cosmic synths and kosmische sequencers. Schmidt took a few years to subtly and meticulously rearrange the major suites from his Black Rainbow score into a work that alludes to the movie but should work for people who’ve never even heard of Panos Cosmatos. In doing so, he has done what neither Daft Punk nor M83 could pull off: He has created a soundtrack that works as an imaginative and often moving standalone album.
Just as Cosmatos drew from his own memory to craft the movie, Schmidt seems to have composed this music based on hazy memories of old soundtracks. There are sly nods to John Carpenter and Goblin, Jan Hammer and Jon McCallum. He uses voices well, an old trope that horror flicks have used to imply some ritualistic terror but here sounds more benign—as though Schmidt is peopling Cosmatos’ often empty frames. On opener “Forever Dilating Eye”, a bodiless choir sings the wordless theme, then fades into a quick pulse of dwindling syllables. The effect is that of humans being broadcast via unreliable technology. Those strange vocals reappear at times throughout the album, until they are finally answered by a mechanistic monotone from the movie about better living through chemistry.
“Elena’s Sound-World” recalls Giorgio Moroder’s work for Oliver Stone, but what’s more impressive is how sympathetic the song is toward the title character, imprisoned in the weird Arboria Institute. The pulsing sequencers and bodiless choir of voices not only sound startlingly tender (echoing the sensitivity with which Cosmatos finally shows her face), but the song grows larger with each measure, as though imagining a wide world beyond the confining walls. On the other hand, “Run Program: Sentionauts”, with its towering organ riffs and prismatic synthesizers, conveys nothing but danger and dread as it reimagines a Popol Vuh Herzog score as a teen slasher soundtrack.
In other words, this is music that tells a story—that, crucially, makes its own powerful statement—even when detached from Beyond the Black Rainbow. It ebbs and flows in dramatic arcs, from the fluttery hush of “Arboria Tapes – Award Winning Gardens” to the foreboding synths of “1983 – Main Titles.” The album builds as it proceeds, such that the errant drones and earth-rattling chords of the seventeen-minute “1966 – Let the New Age of Enlightenment Begin” supply rising action and the eerie prog bombast of closer “Sentionauts II” creates a climactic conclusion. In both the film and its soundtrack, there is a constant sense of opening out: Elena’s world grows larger and larger as she ventures from her cell into the wide world, while Schmidt’s score similarly sounds like it is forever dilating, at least until the last synthburst fades.


Decades into their career, this J-pop superstar continues to evolve—both musically and personally. BADモード reads like a friend’s gentle reminder that we’re always coming into our own.

BADモード

The path to understanding one’s identity is circuitous and without clear instructions—a never-ending process. That’s been obvious for Japanese American singer Hikaru Utada from the beginning. After their work as Cubic U proved a commercial failure, they dropped the stage name and swapped covers of the Carpenters and Burt Bacharach for something closer to their heart: R&B. Their debut album under their own name, 1999’s First Love, broke records and remains the best-selling album by a Japanese artist in Japan. In the decades since, they’ve explored various strains of dance pop, gone on a years-long hiatus, had a son, and written songs about grieving following their mother’s death. Despite all this, their latest album, BADモード (“BAD MODE”), is another reinvention, filled with moments of growth and reflection. Largely ditching the live instrumentation of their last two records for electronics and mellower pop, it favors an atmosphere of wisened, down-home warmth. Its most animating force is subtle: the knowledge that aging is an unceasing expansion and crystallization of self. Utada, who has been irrefutable J-pop royalty for more than 20 years, is still feeling themselves out, and BADモード’s depictions of love and reality—so suffused with relatable emotions—read like a friend’s gentle reminder that we’re always coming into our own.
Last year, Utada detailed their frustrations with English honorifics, signing their name Mys. Utada—short for Mystery Utada—to avoid titles that reductively identify people via sex or marital status. A week later they came out as non-binary. “I’d never come across someone who related to what I would say about how I feel about my body or gender,” they recently told Zane Lowe. “It was like a gift—the knowledge of knowing.”
BADモード doesn’t explicitly tackle gender, but it does extend a loving arm to provide a similar gift of resonating comfort. On the title track, Utada aims for disco-leaning city pop, but instead of the genre’s lively verve, there’s a muted energy fitting their thoughtful, genial concern: Their friend is depressed and they’ll do anything to help. “Here’s a diazepam we can each take half of,” they sing in a softly chipper tone, bright horns following in tow. On the earliest display of Utada’s brilliance, 1998’s “Automatic,” they spoke of a blessed serenity: being around somebody who cares for you. They model that same affection here; despite fear and difficulty, Utada sings with compassionate insistence, “When you feel low and alone, you’d better let me know.”
Utada’s objectives on these 10 tracks are clear: they want to love and be loved in completely invigorating ways. Sometimes that’s through friendship, as in “BADモード.” Sometimes it’s through a romantic partner, like on “One Last Kiss,” where their affection is so boundless that every reverberating synth affirms love’s infinitude. Sometimes it’s with someone who transcends descriptors, as on “Time,” a song originally called “Temozolomide,” after the chemotherapy drug their best friend was taking. Utada talks of confiding in someone close to them, and in a manner that isn’t possible with family members or their boyfriend, but things become confusing. They’d kissed before, and then some, but Utada wistfully confesses, “We don’t fit in this mold of romantic love.” There’s desperation and regret over this relationship, one thwarted by relationship norms and hierarchies, and every full-bodied declaration conveys fiery passion. Their missed opportunity—this irreversibility of time—is devastating.
That Utada sings in both English and Japanese is crucial to these stories’ power. They were born in New York City and have lived between the U.S., Japan, and the UK, but this album is the first to fully reflect their bilingual reality. “Find Love,” which is sung entirely in English, is a throwback vocal-house anthem partly indebted to Glenn Underground’s “May Datroit.” It’s subdued but emotive, and words roll off Utada’s tongue to deliver stream-of-consciousness cries for love and self-care. The clarity of each lyric makes the varied moods palpable, recalling the striking bluntness of Simone’s “My Family Depends on Me”; it understands the dancefloor as a site of pleasure, pain, and vulnerability.
Still, the prevailing mood across BADモード is downcast, and Utada’s most convincing portrait of everyday anhedonia is “気分じゃないの (Not in the Mood),” where they detail observations made at a café: colorful furniture, thumb-wrestling kids, a homeless woman selling poetry. Attempts at casual lyricism had been a sticking point in Utada’s past—“Keep Trying’” was too didactic, while “The Workout” overexplained the poignancy of meeting a born-again Christian. But Utada’s too distressed to force any message here, much to the song’s benefit; bleary atmospherics prevail, carried by a slow downtempo beat. To highlight their listlessness, the English-language chorus riffs on the nursery rhyme “Rain Rain Go Away.” It can seem hackneyed in its portrayal of adult depression, of yearning for a simpler time, but the maneuver is redeemed in the final passage: Utada’s son arrives to sing in a playful, carefree register reminiscent of the late Fishmans singer Shinji Sato. For a moment, the future seems bright, and the lightness of childhood joy is closer than previously imagined.
BADモード’s title refers to feeling despondent, and nine consecutive tracks of emotional turmoil can be punishing. It’s cathartic, then, for it to end with the Floating Points co-production “Somewhere Near Marseilles ーマルセイユ辺りー,” a lively Balearic house epic with acid squelches, hand percussion, and an irresistible depiction of romance. “Say I’m not the only one,” Utada repeats, avoidant and anxious of deep commitment. But the song’s too sunny, the groove too seductive; before long, Utada’s all in on this love, their voice manipulated into effervescent coos and embedded into the track’s rhythmic framework. It really captures the spirit of the city: the dynamic energy of the Old Port, the hypnotic swell of the Mediterranean, the towering grandeur of the Notre-Dame de la Garde. Inspiration can’t help but strike in a locale this rich in beauty, so across 12 minutes Utada conjures up a similarly expansive space overflowing with possibility. In their case, it’s newfound eagerness, flirty gestures, and absolute contentment—genuine breakthroughs for an album in constant search of transformative intimacy. Underlining all this is BADモード’s prevailing message: If you want to grow, your love needs to be fearless.


Michael Silver of CFCF teams with pianist Jean-Michel Blais on a sometimes-gorgeous collection of ambient pieces.

Cascades

Montreal’s Michael Silver maintains an exhausting workload as CFCF. In 2015 alone, he dropped two albums, a Blowing Up the Workshop mix of original material, and an EP. Equally impressive is how Silver strikes—and maintains—a careful balance between charming electronic music and sounds we otherwise look down on: lite-jazz, adult contemporary, Windham Hill-esque new age. In an appreciation of CFCF last year, the New York Times sussed Silver’s aesthetic as where “uncool become[s] cool” and “defiantly corny.”
That balancing act continues into the present with Cascades, Silver’s collaboration with newcomer and fellow Canadian, pianist Jean-Michel Blais. Together, they move into some new genre terrain to mixed results. Blais only just released his debut album last year, but he's been making minimalist piano music on his own for two decades while teaching music by day. An album featuring piano and electronics is generally an austere exercise, as the resonance between piano keys provides the space in which best to insert electronic washes—see Fennesz and Sakamoto or, more recently, Bing & Ruth. This five-track EP finds Silver and Blais warily feeling one another other out and then synchronizing to exalted effect by the record's end.
They open with “Hasselblad 1,” a restrained piece that showcases Blais’ ability to expand the melodic lines with eloquence, leaving just a few patches of space for Silver to dab in with additional color. It’s lovely, but it feels like they're establishing their respective spaces rather than moving as a single unit. On “Two Mirrors,” Blais hammers a repetitive piano line redolent of Philip Glass, finding new accents and rhythms in it, steadily adding to the theme in the upper and lower registers. Outside of some atmospheric moments, you'd be hard-pressed to pinpoint which sounds belong to Silver, as he allows Blais and his piano to dominate. Silver’s synths swell and find more space on the gentle “Spirit.” At times it’s reminiscent of Boards of Canada, but Blais deftly nudges the piece away from such a tangible aesthetic.
By this point, they're clicking, and the record has successfully outlined its parameters. But the delicate mix of sounds is derailed by “Hypocrite,” wherein the duo edge into questionable territory. A rolling melody from Blais provides the drama for the piece. But when Silver enters, it’s with his synths set to “EDM.” In this setting, the drama of Blais’ piano pushes the track to the brink of being “big tent,” as if the Piano Guys got a makeover by OWSLA.
They remedy the situation with Cascades’s longest piece, a stunning rendition of John Cage’s 1948 piece, “In a Landscape.” For those more familiar with Cage’s later work, which embraces silence, dissonance, and chance operations, “Landscape” is a melodic composition clearly indebted to ambient godfather Erik Satie. On this version, Blais’ piano moves at a stately pace as Silver adds flickering electronics and a bit of radio chatter in the background (perhaps a sly nod to Cage’s shortwave radio piece, “Imaginary Landscape”?). Four minutes in, marimba and chimes ripple and synthesized strings quiver to life and it evokes a rolling pastoral scene the moment the sunlight lands upon it just so, so that every tree and hill on the horizon seems to glow golden. For all of the uneven and uncertain moments of Cascades, it ends on a very high note, and “Landscape” is one of the most unequivocally gorgeous covers imaginable.


Minneapolis MC continues to explore his inner landscape with tales of personal disillusionment, righteous political anger, and emotional calamity.

The Undisputed Truth

On the surface, Brother Ali is a bruiser. His voice is blunt, his manner curt, and his point of reference planted in a gritty, urban life. But listen closer and you'll notice that he's a tortured soul, with a life that is meticulously and laboriously examined. On "Here", the Minneapolis emcee confides, "We dine here on a balanced diet/ Ego when it's loud/ Self-hatred when it's quiet." And on much of The Undisputed Truth, things are very, very quiet.
Ali's focus on his inner landscape is the rapper's greatest asset and his biggest liability. There are times when his tales of personal disillusionment, righteous political anger, and emotional calamity are scarily realistic, but as often as not this obsession with his own emotions is incredibly megalomaniacal and incalculably boring. It isn't that his troubles are minor or tedious, it's that we don't entirely know his troubles-- only that he's troubled.
Ali does, however, deliver a hell of an opening punch with "Whatcha' Got". Churning power chords crash against a giant bass and restless snares, and Ant's beat bears more than a passing resemblance to Just Blaze's beat for Fat Joe's "Safe to Say". What the song lacks in originality it makes up for in sweaty bombast, and Ali is in loud/ego mode as he declares that the "champion is back" and spends three verse attacking rival rap crews. The bluster works, making this song among the strongest on the album.
But later the focus turns inward. "The Puzzle" finds him playing the part of a victim, musing that the constant struggles define him. It's the sort of idea best delivered by greasy gurus at self-improvement seminars, and everything here is mawkish self-definition or cliché. One minute he claims that he's "tormented and tortured, and got nothing but gray hairs to show for it." The next he tells fans to keep their heads up and demands respect. He does let slip in the song's final verse that he's a single father and that he recently lost his mother to cancer – both reasonably interesting subjects-- but the details are limited.
And it isn't as if Ali doesn't know how to paint a picture or tell a story. The songs that concern themselves with specific incidents and have concrete settings are the set's strongest. "Lookin' At Me Sideways" begins by taking aim at e-thugs-- the wanna-be gangstas who issue threats behind the anonymity of a screen name-- but that's a mere launching point for an amusing bout of self-definition. Here, Ali is "a thugged out nerd," the sort of guy who eats "organic vegetables mixed with fast food" and claims he's somewhere between Howard Zinn and Howard Stern.
Ali honors the former on "Letter from the Government" when he takes aim at Bush's foreign policy misadventures. Over a slow, spare beat (the entire album is produced by the slick but derivative Atmosphere member Ant) Ali recounts opening a letter from the Army Reserves calling him to go to Iraq. His "knuckles turn white/ Eyes begin bulging," and he sulks, remembering the "blue sirens" and abusive cops. "What kind a sucker would I have to be after these years of you harassing and attacking me to go join the calvary?" he asks. "In the name of freedom, I'm supposed to one in his head?"
But what lies at the heart of Ali's malaise is his recent divorce, which he deals with head on in "Walking Away". The song is an open letter of sorts, with Ali directly addressing his ex. "You're about to lose the company your misery loves," he says. Later he'll claim she tried to kill him, and that he never loved her and only stayed as long as he did for the kid. Ant's slow and slinky beat, with a whistle as its centerpiece, provides an effective juxtaposition and makes Ali's vile go down a little easier. It's a great track: honest, heartfelt, and (perhaps most importantly) very descriptive.


The title of *Key Markets—*something between Sleaford Mods' third album and their ninth, depending on how you count—refers to a '70s-era supermarket, but it's also a canny reference to the way the post-punk duo's been clawing its way up in the British music scene.

Key Markets

Jason Williamson's speaking voice is gloriously bilious: hoarse with fury, spraying plosives everywhere, turning up the kinked corners of his East Midlands accent as far as they'll go, cramming syllables into every line because nobody's going to fooken shut him up, mate. It's the cornerstone of Sleaford Mods' sound, underscored by double-tracking on crucial phrases; the music behind it is loops made by Andrew Fearn, the other half of the band, mostly from blunt basement-rock bass and drums. (On stage, the two of them are a delightful contrast: Williamson burning-eyed and venting, Fearn hanging back with a beer in his hand, bobbing his head and not even pretending to do more than press the start button at the beginning of each song.)
Williamson and Fearn are both weary-looking white guys in their mid-forties, and they've been kicking around the music world long enough to not have an iota of idealism about it. The title of *Key Markets—*something between Sleaford Mods' third album and their ninth, depending on how you count—refers to a '70s-era supermarket, but it's also a canny reference to the way the band has been clawing its way up in the British music scene. It's been less than a year since Williamson was able to quit his day job as a "benefits adviser," which provided the raw material for both their best-known older song, "Jobseeker", and the new album's "Face to Faces": "Free money, mate, just fill in the form and if you can't then I can 'elp ya."
The state of a working class that politics have kicked in the face over and over is the central subject of Williamson's topical, allusive, syllable-drunk lyrics. His mocking rants spool out like bog roll yanked by a cat, occasionally rhyming, miraculously snapping into sync with Fearn's beats. "Miliband got hit with the ugly stick, not that it matters/ The chirping cunt obviously wants the country in tatters," Williamson spits on "In Quiet Streets"; it's not quite Eminem-caliber for either invective or internal rhyme, and it arrives two months after Ed Miliband resigned as Leader of the Labour Party, but it'll do. (Likewise, you need to have a fairly deep knowledge of both British politics and Britpop to parse a couplet from "Rupert Trousers": "Idiots visit submerged villages in 200-pound wellies, spitting out fine cheese made by that tool from Blur/ Even the drummer’s a fuckin' MP: fuck off, you cunt, sir.")
Sometimes Williamson sings, after a fashion, which is where Key Markets gets weird, in much the same way that early Fall records got weird when Mark E. Smith tried to carry a tune. (The creepily catchy "Tarantula Deadly Cargo", which may or may not be a scatological joke, would fit right in on the Fall's Dragnet, especially Fearn's asthmatic guitar plinks.) "No One's Bothered" is another sung one, the closest thing here to the form of the '70s punk that's deeply embedded in Sleaford Mods' art, and it's built on a smart trick from Fearn. His rhythm track is a three-minute extension of a punk song's bolting bass-and-drums intro, a loop of the few seconds before the guitar inevitably dives in—which it never does here. "You're trapped? Me too," Williamson snaps. "Alienation? No one's bothered." The punk rock on which Williamson and Fearn grew up promised a lot of catharses that weren't actually forthcoming, so they don't even hint at those. But they've adopted its raw elements—crudity, spittle, black humor and unpretty voices—as durable tools to express discontent.


The Swedish counterculture legends formerly known as Träd, Gräs och Stenar revisit the universe they created in the 1970s, building woolly, choogling rock songs that sound both earthy and sublime.

Träden

When Träd, Gräs och Stenar got started in 1969, they were a one-of-a-kind counterculture act. As famous for their expansive, psychedelic jams as they were for their sincere DIY ethos, the Swedish ensemble didn’t just book their own shows and foster a scene—they built their own gear and even cooked macrobiotic meals for audiences at their performances, which were frequently held outdoors.
Through these practices, the band (whose name translates to “Trees, Grass, and Stones”) developed a Be Here Now-adjacent ethos that resonated with left-leaning Swedes of the era. Today, the band endures as Träden (“The Trees”), with guitarist and vocalist Jakob Sjöholm as the sole holdover from those early days. The bandmates he’s recruited over the past decade include Dungen guitarist Reine Fiske and bassist Sigge Krantz, as well as drummer Hanna Östergren. On their self-titled LP, they reverently expand the Träd, Gräs och Stenar universe, building songs that sound both earthy and sublime.
At first blush, Träden easily recalls the early work of Träd, Gräs och Stenar, making the same gestures toward woolly, choogling rock. The band’s winding songs aren’t familiar, per se, but it’s easy to guess their arcs: The rhythm section rumbles along hypnotic grooves while jagged electric guitar riffs spiral in different directions. “När Lingon Mognar (Lingonberries Forever)” makes for a stately and sober opener, before the brisk romp “Kung Karlsson (King Karlsson)” stirs in some sunshine with keys that flit in and out of the mix like butterflies early in the track. From there, the album’s moods vary from the airy, peaceful aura of “Hoppas Du Förstår (Hope You Understand)” to the oozing darkness of “OTO” and the brooding “Hymn.” With the exception of the stormy closing track “Det Finns Blått (There Is Blue),” the music of Träden feels softer, gentler, and the slightest bit clearer on this release, an attribute that is a credit to high-fidelity recording as much as it is to the musicians’ chemistry.
It feels appropriate that the arboreal portion of the band’s original name has remained: Sjöholm’s weathered voice and the songs’ deliberate, unhurried pacing bring to mind a band made up of Ents, the anthropomorphic tree creatures from Tolkien’s Middle Earth, rather than human musicians. “Å Nej (Oh No),” which begins with rain sounds before a swampy acoustic guitar lick takes the lead, cements this impression. An electric guitar’s insectile buzzing furthers the song’s woodsy appeal.
But Träden’s insistence on following the Träd, Gras och Stenar blueprint is also the band’s greatest liability. So much of what made the original group so special was its attachment to particular sentiments, ideals, and people. The band’s ideology—and thus its music—was built on a community in a specific time and place, so what does it mean to reach for similar (if not exactly the same) ends in the absence of the same conditions?
In 2002, original Träd, Gräs och Stenar bassist Torbjörn Abelli (who died in 2010) wrote, “Our music was a sort of ritualistic battle cry, a call for people to be free, follow their own rhythm, their own harmony: set yourself free from your own oppressors.” The contemporary Träden offers one flavor of freedom, kicking open the gate to a new pasture in which listeners can frolic and find respite. If only the band could also break free of its own legacy.


Co-produced with Lydia Lunch, the new Pissed Jeans LP is the sludge-punk band’s cleanest, most hi-fidelity album, and their deepest dive into the inglorious male psyche yet.

Why Love Now

Sometimes the best thing you can do as a male feminist is shut up and listen to women who know what they’re talking about better than you. That advice might hold doubly true for male musicians. For every “Suggestion”—and, really, there’s only been one “Suggestion”—there are countless self-identified good guys looking for an easy pat on the back simply for having their heart in the right place. There’s a reason why feminist punk spun off into a kind of genre unto itself: This is not subject matter that men usually do well.
Between their territorial growls and bludgeoning guitars, Pennsylvania sludge-punks Pissed Jeans have made a brand out of unfiltered male aggression; each of their four albums has played like an American Splendor comic reenacted by grizzly bears. Yet more so than frontmen who profess to be infinitely more political, Matt Korvette understands what he can contribute to the conversation about gender relations. His songs offer insight into the forces that drive men: the privileges, compulsions, indignities, entitlements, and double standards. He’s touched on this territory often—most notably on “Male Gaze,” his rubbernecking apology from 2013’s terrific Honeys—but he’s never run with the muse as righteously as he does on Why Love Now, the band’s deepest dive yet into the inglorious male psyche.
The record could almost pass for a concept album, if not for all of Korvette’s usual digressions. He balances out his social insights with asides about sugary snacks, laugh-tracked sitcoms, astrology, and the like, and those flashes of irreverence are more welcome than ever, since the core of the album couldn’t be more pointed. “The Bar Is Low” challenges the way society coddles men, rewarding them for the most modest demonstrations of decency, as if simply not being a violent monster entitles them to a medal. “Held down a job/Even snagged a raise,” Korvette sings, “Right there you’re due/For effusive praise.” On “It’s Your Knees,” he demonstrates how men neg women, picking at their insecurities to cut down their esteem.
And since it wouldn’t be a Pissed Jeans album without a healthy dose of sex and shame, there’s plenty of that, too. “Cold Whip Cream” introduces a frustrated guy too embarrassed to ask his partner to indulge his kink. On “Ignorecam,” Korvette goes off over a Motörhead-worthy riff about the absurdity of men paying cam girls to essentially ignore them: “So you're sick of interacting with women, you wanna pay for something that's free?/Shut yourself up and load the ignorecam, getting off on letting her be.” The track ends in angry, carnal release, with Korvette so overcome with self-hating ecstasy he loses track of his spelling. “N-O-R-G-I-E me!” he chants orgasmically, “O-G-I-N-R-E me!” It’s grotesque, funny, and unsettling—the Pissed Jeans sweet spot, basically.
As deft as Korvette is at describing what the patriarchy looks like from a man’s eyes, Why Love Now’s sharpest insights come from outside himself—by actually bringing in a woman. Author Lindsay Hunter penned and performs “I’m a Man,” a mid-album monologue about life as the office alpha male. Adopting her best Danny McBride voice, she assails a coworker with come-ons and double entendres: “You take dic-tations?/You get it?/You ever been stapled?/… You cold?/Put on that cardigan you got hanging over your chair/Do it slow.” Behind her committed comic performance, there’s a threat of real violence.
On a less loaded song cycle, Why Love Now’s relative tunefulness would be the narrative. No wave pioneer Lydia Lunch produced the album along with black metal practitioner Arthur Rizk, and while that seems like it should be a recipe for discord, the pairing somehow resulted in the cleanest, most high-fidelity Pissed Jeans record yet. None of the bands’ primary influences ever made an album this approachable—not Melvins, not the Jesus Lizard, certainly not Pigfuck. The glistening post-punk riff on “Love Without Emotion” could have come from any number of friendly, telegenic British buzz bands; it’d be virtually unidentifiable as a Pissed Jeans track if not for Korvette’s phlegmy ogre routine. The band was wise to offer more carrot than stick for this one, though. Their music has never gone down easier, but their commentary has never hit so uncomfortably hard.


Andreas Kleerup might turn out to have been the Zelig of late-'00s Swedish dance-pop, considering his collaborations with Robyn, Lykke Li, Neneh Cherry, and the Tough Alliance. He returns with a mini-album of his trademark synth pop that's heavy on guests.

As If We Never Won

Andreas Kleerup might turn out to have been the Zelig of late-'00s Swedish dance-pop. The Stockholm producer's surname originally appeared as the main artist on late-2006 single "With Every Heartbeat", a string-draped beat ballad that went on to become a UK No. 1 for Robyn. His 2008 album, simply titled Kleerup, gave an early glimpse of now-U2-collaborator Lykke Li broadening the coy range of her debut album earlier that year. Neneh Cherry? The Swedish-born pop innovator made herself at home on Kleerup's debut, too. Throw in connections to the Concretes (whose Lisa Millberg guests on Kleerup) and the Tough Alliance (his group the Meat Boys remixed 2004's "Holiday") and this erstwhile drummer is six degrees from just about any Swede you'd care to name. Going beyond Scandinavia for a second: Did I mention he did a remix for Lady Gaga?
Kleerup's first major release since his self-titled debut went international in 2009 shows he still has fine taste in friends, but it's a bit like being introduced to perfectly nice people at a party where the host isn't able or willing to help explain what you have in common. As If We Never Won, the first of two mini-albums Kleerup plans to release in the next couple of years, once again fixes undeniably talented Swedish vocalists to unabashedly warm-blooded synth-pop. This time, though, the combination just doesn't result in songs as fresh and appealing as "With Every Heartbeat" or Lykke Li team-up "Until It Bleeds"; Kleerup doesn't turn out to be endlessly adaptable to the artists he's with, after all. The result is a pleasant yet also mildly puzzling stopgap that fails either to show newcomers what all the original fuss was about or longtime fans why a proper follow-up has taken so long.
Despite the long gap since Kleerup, that album's '80s-immersed spaciousness has remained a common characteristic in more recent pop. So it's not that Kleerup sounds behind the times when he delves into operatic Euro disco with M83/Röyksopp vocalist Susanne Sundfør on "Let Me In"—though the song's video, which mainly focuses on Kleerup and his gear, through occasional colored effects, may speak to where his aesthetic is at these days. He broadens his palette a bit, too: "Rock U", a smoky collaboration with Niki and the Dove's Malin Dahlstrom, winds up somewhere between the new Stevie Nicks album and Haim's "Forever (Giorgio Moroder (Remix)". And an appearance by constantly underrated former First Floor Power singer Jenny Wilson is always welcome, arriving here in the cryptic, mournful pulse of "To Die For".
Still, it's hard to shake the sense these all would have been lesser cuts on the debut album, and nothing here lifts the full record out of its malaise. Opening instrumental "Sad Boys", another one in the Moroder-Cerrone tradition, works as a continuation of Kleerup-closing "I Just Want to Make That Sad Boy Smile" (sorry, anyone reading this hoping for a Yung Lean tie-in). Kleerup's serviceable coo fails to catch a spark in the title track's vocoder-brooding duet with the Sounds' Maja Ivarsson, as the two exchange generic phrases ("I'll never let you down / I'll keep on breaking down/ Signed, sealed, whatever"). Most perplexing of all is the finale, "Thank God for Sending Demons", a hoarse-voiced acoustic dirge that shares its title with a 2011 song by another Kleerup band, Me and My Army, but isn't a recognizable cover. At some point along the six degrees of separation, a true sense of connection has been lost.
Kleerup was, however, wise to use the mini-album format. The setting has recently been good to artists from the Knife and Röyksopp / Robyn to Best Coast, and it's a reasonable length for a Kleerup release in an era when there's no need to fill out an entire CD (my CD version of the first album isn't even that old, yet my computer can't play it anymore—MP3s prevail!). But the lack of time to get lost in a record's particular world makes it all the more important to have songs that resonate in their own right. Kleerup has been busier than you might've thought since 2008—along with the folk-leaning Me and My Army, he released a Sweden-only Kleerup full-length, 2012's *Aniara—*so it's possible he's saving his best stuff for the next mini-album. For now, those interested in hearing the most essential post-Kleerup Kleerup music should probably go back to his production for Robyn on "In My Eyes", from 2010's Body Talk: "You put your dancing shoes on, and you do it again." Or,  you know, kick off your Sunday shoes, whatever.


On his latest, Ty asserts his mastery over 25 lush, intricate tracks. With a wide-ranging guest roster including serpentwithfeet and Thundercat, Featuring is a capital-A Album, designed to be consumed in an hour-long gulp.

Featuring Ty Dolla $ign

In the time since Ty Dolla $ign’s last solo album, his gritty vibrato has been everywhere. The summer Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music dropped five albums, Ty was a staple in their credits. There he was on Scorpion, his falsetto undulating beside Drake’s. He warbled over a tepid Chainsmokers beat, resuscitated a limp Post Malone track, released a gleaming, absurdly horny album of duets with Jeremih, found his way onto the chorus of “Hot Girl Summer” and, most recently, harnessed energy from crystals to croon the hook on SZA’s return single. His range is obvious and impressive; he likes to remind us of it. “You really doing them a favor, blessing them with your talent,” his brother Big TC says in the new album’s opening seconds, recorded from the prison where TC is serving a life sentence for a murder Ty has said he didn’t commit. “You can sing, rap, write, produce, engineer, mix, and master.” It’s a callback to the skit at the start of “Bring it Out of Me,” a thumping electro-flecked standout from Ty’s debut album. “You know how to do everything,” Big TC said then, his voice crackling through the phone.
Featuring asserts that mastery over 25 lush, intricate tracks. Every synth and guest verse and snarl of bass glides into place. This is a capital-A Album, designed to be consumed in an hour-long gulp. Some of its most salient moments come in the transitions between songs—the woozy drums in “Temptations” collapse into serpentwithfeet’s elegiac interlude; the screeched adlibs in “Dr. Sebi” drift into the shimmering Gunna collab “Powder Blue.” There are myriad moving parts here: lilting interludes, more guitar than Ty has ever used in a record, an array of high-profile features (including two tracks with Kanye). Ty is less of a curator than a conductor. These songs are intentionally, achingly stitched together, and even the weaker singles shine when played in context.
That’s part of the mystery, and the sheen, of Ty’s craft: moments that objectively should not work somehow do. “Damn, that pussy fuego!” he yelps on “Time Will Tell,” but the gentle thrum of guitar and the gooey harmonies wash away that line’s inanity. “I can’t lie, it’s obvious/ Ain’t nobody sexing good as us,” he murmurs in his honeyed flow on “Slow It Down,” and the statement sounds tender amid an immaculate sweep of strings. The more lackluster of these tracks are still slickly competent, with wobbling hooks primed for TikTok dances; the best are spectral and stunning. “Track 6” is particularly elegant, a panoramic swirl that melds Thundercat’s wriggling, ricocheting bass with Anderson .Paak’s best feature in years. Ty has said that he knows, instinctively, who would pair best with him on a beat as soon as he hears it. That intuition has mesmerizing results. Drill rapper Lil Durk writhes over “Double R”’s pulsing drum pattern. Kehlani’s plush harmonies are a perfect complement to Ty’s rasp on “Universe.” “Lift Me Up” turns Future’s burbles about “codeine in a Hi-C” and Young Thug’s wish for an IV filled with molly into a disarmingly lovely prayer.
“Your Turn” is the most stirring of these collaborations, a mesh of Musiq Soulchild and Tish Hyman’s velvet vocals and a soft 6LACK verse. It’s the longest track by far, with what Ty has said are his favorite lyrics on the album. They anchor the record in a delicate, nuanced hope. “Nobody’s truly yours,” Tish belts in the chorus, not sounding despondent but genuinely awed at the discovery. “I fell in love at sixteen, in love at 20, fell in love at 22,” Soulchild wails. “Now what the hell does it all mean?” In Ty’s previous albums, this prodding may have led him to get drunk and FaceTime his exes; here, he wishes them well and sounds at peace.
The bar for maturity may be pretty low for a guy who’s referred to women as “horses in the stable” and cobbled a breakout hit out of cramming them into a cabana. After a slew of slinky hits about juggling multiple lovers, though, “Temptations” seems like a meditation on fidelity—a sequel to Ty’s club anthem “Paranoid” that sounds actually distressed. “So it’s fuck your feelings, girl, I’m single for the night,” Ty cries, then walks it back later: “My love for you won’t go anywhere,” he breathes, his voice mingling with Kid Cudi’s haunted drone. It’s a more convincing display than the sunny “By Yourself,” a Jhené Aiko-assisted ode to single mothers. Ty’s at his best when he’s wrestling with growth, not proclaiming it.
“Many people have said that when you see a song that says, ‘featuring Ty Dolla $ign,’ you know it’s going to be fire,” Ty wrote on Instagram to announce the album. The title is both joking and not, and the weight of what Ty wants to prove hangs over the record. “I told Ye to run for president,” he raps on “Status.”  “He said, ‘Dolla, you too good to put your voice on that generic shit.’” It’s both a flex and a condemnation, a sign that Ty is maybe embarrassed of how he’s spent the last few years. Featuring cements his legacy as a singular, eminent artist — a point he has made again and again and again, but he still sounds so good proving it.

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Songwriter Caleb Cordes’ third LP sets aside big hooks for a different kind of immediacy, scaling back reverb and elaborate riffs in favor of a renewed appreciation for taking life as it comes.

Ground Aswim

Ground Aswim begins as a mystery that demands Caleb Cordes’ full attention, and his bandmates respond in kind; if they played any quieter than they do on “Where Did You Go?” Sinai Vessel couldn’t be called a rock band anymore. There’s a shellshocked quality to Cordes’ voice—like he’s survived either an apocalyptic event or a terrible hangover—as he walks the barren streets of a small town where people never just up and leave. A few memories emerge: an abandoned pair of yellow flip-flops in the middle of the road, an empty classroom chair. When he reaches a dead end, the drums drop out as he mutters the song’s title in private prayer. It’s a moment typically described as a “gut punch,” though he’s the one on the receiving end. Sinai Vessel are only interested in the epiphanies that sneak up on you throughout Ground Aswim, an album that looks back patiently on years of seemingly unremarkable days, only to realize that nothing is the same anymore.
Things don’t happen quickly for Sinai Vessel. Cordes tempted fate by calling his debut Labor Pains; its follow-up was rewritten, remixed, and re-recorded over three and a half years. When Brokenlegged finally arrived on the crest of emo’s turbulent fourth wave, it bore little resemblance to the music that inspired Cordes in 2017. Ground Aswim is more in sync with his current taste for spectral indie folk, a Texas-made album that honors an affinity for Big Thief and Lomelda. As with Hannah, Ground Aswim was recorded in Silsbee at Lazybones Audio with Tommy Read, and it aspires to the tactile, live-room immediacy of the Marfa-born Two Hands. Where Brokenlegged slathered guitars in unruly fuzz and reverb, they’re now as dry and gnarled as petrified wood. If the six-minute perpetual motion machine “Tunneling” doesn’t quite deliver his own “Not,” its searing solo still got him a heretofore implausible mention in Guitar World.
Ground Aswim otherwise forgoes showboating, seemingly as a rebuke to the dense arrangements of Brokenlegged. Cordes sets aside big hooks for a different kind of immediacy, one where each musical choice feels like the product of rigorous and unsparing consideration—a brief string swell during “Fragile,” the clenched-teeth tension of “All Days Just End” released with a crash cymbal beaten until it warps. At every turn, he scrutinizes songwriting choices he may have made in the past: Does that chord need four strings when two will suffice? Is that hi-hat necessary or just a habit? How much more effective would that tambourine be if it was just a few bars, or if a piano riff was actually just one note? What if the chorus only happened once? The quietude of Ground Aswim isn’t only an aesthetic preference—inspired by Cordes’ bouts of tinnitus, “Ringing” is both distorted and eerily muted, emulating the experience of hearing his own band through a debilitating headache.
Rather than projecting outwards towards organized religion or intolerant neighbors, Sinai Vessel’s musical evolution permits Cordes to see his past more clearly. He spends nearly every song on Ground Aswim taking stock of things he didn’t allow himself to fully appreciate: relationships both platonic and romantic, live performance, the time we have each day to be useful to one another. It all comes back to the same fear of a level of commitment that leaves one feeling exposed. “There’s a part of me/That’s been taught/That there’s no consequence when I’m not all in,” Cordes sings on “Shameplant.” Consider Ground Aswim a surgical removal.

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The Chicago rapper’s new album contains a few flashes of brilliance, but the aloof flows that set him apart now feel a little too familiar.

Vacabularee

Name a U.S. city and you can pretty much guarantee it’s home to a new wave of rappers boasting emotionless, too-cool-to-care flows. Among the strongest from the past few years are late Cali storytellers Drakeo the Ruler and Bris, who coldly broke down street politics with a shrug. On 2019’s Days B4 III, Chicago’s Lucki used his inexpressiveness to convey heartbreak and the pain of addiction; meanwhile, the casual deadpans of Detroit spitters like World Tour Mafia, Baby Smoove, and Veeze are designed to make the good life sound routine. With that in mind, Valee’s zen, sleepwalking delivery is not quite the anomaly it was nearly five years ago when he was actively rewiring rap flows with the tumbling nonchalance of “Two 16s.” But his voice still doesn’t sound like anyone else’s: There are layers, switch-ups, and clever intricacies that have kept the Chi-Town native fresh. Detached flows may have become increasingly popular, but Vacabularee is a reminder of Valee’s singularity, even if he’s settled into his comfort zone.
The rapping is skillful here, but it doesn’t feel engineered to blow you away–though it occasionally will. Valee just finds the coolest form in which to rap a verse, a line, or a particular phrase. On “Alpina Beama,” the words themselves aren’t that compelling, but it’s covered up with a flow that works like a continuous stream, making it difficult to tell where bars begin and end. The rhymes are a bit more playful and colorful on “LaFlare;” Valee slows things down, so you can’t miss his punchline about doing donuts in the parking lot of a PetSmart, or misunderstand his slick yet simple wordplay. If some of these bars were said by anyone else, they might feel mailed-in, but Valee’s distinctive vocal wrinkles make them highlights. When he raps, “And I got her right down in Chanel, parentheses” on “Eye Get Money,” the fairly ordinary punchline becomes anthemic as he holds the purr syllable of “parentheses.” It’s like watching the Denzel Washington monologue at the end of Training Day–it would be dumb if he didn’t make it feel so bracing.
Sometimes, though, when Valee isn’t pushing himself, the relative predictability can feel boring. On “Jumpman,” Valee joins ZelooperZ, a like-minded oddball who shares a penchant for flows that are always ahead of the curve. But the possibilities they had for a joint track are a lot wilder in theory, and the straightforwardness is a letdown. The technical rapping is sharp on “Free Willy,” but the murmuring direction makes it feel incomplete. A handful of the blown-out bass beats (see: “Woozi” and “Bell Biv Devoe”) are characteristic for Valee, but they also feel dated, diverting attention from the actual rapping. These moments make you wish that he was chasing brilliance more often, instead of being content with stumbling into it.
It’s hard to harp on this point, considering that Valee is still an exciting rapper without that level of ambition. His array of flows is the draw, but his funny everyman raps are just as good because of how specific they are: Over the spacey groove of “Koala,” he brags about the wall art he purchased on Etsy; he runs up a $900 bill at Costco on “Eye Get Money;” and on “Double Dutch,” he shouts out the most random late era Bruce Willis movie. The only reasonable explanation is that he must’ve been flipping through the deep corners of his cable package directly before entering the booth. It’s something only Valee would do.


The Oakland R&B singer’s latest project is a shining example of both her emotional intelligence and her balmy, lucid songwriting.

While We Wait

“Somebody out there really needs to hear this,” Kehlani stated, with earned conviction, on the first track of her second mixtape, 2015’s You Should Be Here. That four-word title alone revealed her emotional intelligence and extraordinary empathy—attuned to the injustice of family members who died before they should have, to friends lost, and to how lovers can be physically present even when they are already long gone. “I’ve felt more pain than some will in their entire lives, all before the age of even being able to buy a fucking drink in a bar,” Kehlani continued on You Should Be Here’s opening monologue, setting the stage and clearing the air for all the raw feeling that would follow.
In her journey from a gauged-ear teen on “America’s Got Talent” to her current zen-like self—pop music sage, wellness app guru, “Come As You Are” tattooed above a portrait of Lauryn Hill on her left bicep—Kehlani, who is now 23, has spoken bluntly about her struggles with mental health and her difficult childhood, likening her parents to Bonnie and Clyde. But in an era of morbid sadness in pop and rap, Kehlani’s songs are tinged with optimism. “Piece of Mind,” the breezy highlight of her 2017 debut LP SweetSexySavage, was a poised anthem about regaining composure and self-worth after a psychologically fraught time. Kehlani’s music knows hurt, but its theme is survival.
While We Wait is Kehlani’s fourth project: her third mixtape and first since SweetSexySavage. Fittingly titled, it was made during her pregnancy (Kehlani’s daughter is due in March) and is her strongest, most distilled release. The playlistification of mainstream music has not hindered this refreshingly concise collection of pop, rap, and ’90s R&B resilience. The sparkling self-respect jam “Morning Glory” evokes TLC, autonomy, and collectedness. The tape’s most thrilling single, “Nunya,” is like Kehlani’s savage take on “Bug A Boo,” with a monster hook to match its monster kiss-off: “You put on a show/’Cause you don’t want the world to know/That you lost the girl who got it on her own.” And the opener “Footsteps” is angelic neo-soul with the piercing emotionality of Joni Mitchell. “When I walked away/I left footsteps in the mud so you could follow me,” Kehlani sings, a simply gorgeous sentiment about leaving a person even if you don’t want to.
The nine songs on While We Wait sometimes feel like a scripted drama about just how complicated love and communication can be in our hyper-mediated present. Kehlani meets peers like SZA and Drake in illustrating those messy realities and then some, sifting through past traumas, suppressed feelings, the shortcomings of language, and the constraints of masculinity. Her primary characters are broken people with baggage attempting to understand one another: “Shoulda never gave you my heart on consignment,” she sings on the aching, moody break-up banger “Nights Like This,” and things grow harder from there. But Kehlani treads into these seas, looks for anchors, and does not shy away from the crashing waves. “I see you duck and dodge at every bend,” she whisper-raps on the spare, vulnerable “Butterfly,” insuring a partner that, “It’ll make you no less of a man/To break your walls and simply grab my hand.” All of Kehlani’s music—but none so much as While We Wait—feels like taking TLC’s “Damaged” and trying to heal it.
An unlikely highlight, then, “Too Deep” is a labyrinth intervention, spiraling into a sublime girl-group choir of Kehlani’s who all narrate that suffocating titular state of feeling suddenly, perilously in over your head. “We was candy crushin,” Kehlani exclaims, “But this shit gettin’ too deep.” Despite its crestfallen subject matter, “Too Deep” is excellent fun. I like to imagine Kehlani listening to her hero, Mariah Carey, in her immortal song “We Belong Together,” remarking “this is too deep” about that one Bobby Womack tune on her radio, and then making a song based on that precise feeling.
The most crushing While We Wait track is “Footsteps,” an ode to honesty and patience in the wake of a dysfunctional relationship. It contains a magical melancholy, the kind that lifts you up. “Cheers to being honest/Neither of us knew what we wanted,” goes the resigned and uncommonly human refrain. An equally potent line—about the tendency of men to use women as therapy—comes later from the featured singer Musiq Soulchild: “I treated you like medicine/But I guess I wasn’t listening.” Kehlani’s truth, though, rings resoundingly. Across While We Wait, her lucidity is pure relief, but “Footsteps” is so eloquent and resolved that you want to bow your head when it ends. Kehlani is teaching us how to talk to one another, and in the process, her voice has emerged more clearly than ever.


It originally came out in 2012, but Hop Along's brilliant Get Disowned, now reissued, feels like it could’ve been the complicated, difficult follow-up to last year's Painted Shut.

Get Disowned

The consensus critical acclaim for Hop Along’s sophomore LP, Painted Shut, felt like a foregone conclusion, and the band’s singer and songwriter Frances Quinlan was given the title of the best voice in indie rock without much dissent. But Google “Hop Along Get Disowned Review", and you’ll see that the band’s proper 2012 debut (Quinlan had released a solo album under the name) was as universally overlooked as Painted Shut was universally praised. With its swift reissue on Saddle Creek, Get Disowned now feels like it could’ve been Painted Shut’s complicated, difficult follow-up, but one that stands to be just as beloved, because this band remains virtually peerless in indie rock.
In 2012, Hop Along weren’t the robust, road-tested band that could be tasked with warming up amphitheaters for heartland indie acts like the War on Drugs, Modest Mouse, and Dr. Dog. Get Disowned's original release also happened at least a year before any of the narratives that would either directly or peripherally benefit the band—Philadelphia emerging as the nation’s indie rock capital, the emo revival, mainstream attention to Fest, the annual October weekend in Gainesville, Fla., that serves as a proving ground for many of the bands responsible for those first two narratives. Praise would eventually start to accumulate, the most notable being a tweet where blink–182’s Mark Hoppus called this record’s “Tibetan Pop Stars” “the most painfully beautiful song ever.”
Whatever your qualms with the source, Hoppus’ words reached an audience for whom a blink-182 cosign could make a difference. And you know what? “Tibetan Pop Stars” is painfully beautiful, though perhaps not as indicative of any vestigial emo roots as the nearly seven-minute song written from the perspective of a talking mattress, serving as an impartial arbiter in a breakup that just won’t end (“Laments”). But along with beautiful pain and painful beauty, “Tibetan Pop Stars” is also really, really funny, with Quinlan seeking escape from being tied down in any way, especially a boring relationship. And if anyone did ask her about her significant other, fuck something as basic as “he’s in Canada”: Quinlan’s beau is a seducer of Tibetan pop stars and connoisseur of luxury automobiles. It’s the work of a whimsical, wild imagination, but it's also an alibi, one that will probably get the asker to let the subject drop and leave her alone.
The humor of Get Disowned may have deflected from just how brutally honest and devastating it is. In 2012, Quinlan described her ultimate songwriting goal as, “finding [a] character and creating a world,” which seemed more in line with the literary, referential Painted Shut than it does with the songs here. The tragedies and personal failings on Get Disowned feel more like autobiography—“Trouble Found Me” expresses the horrifying imagery of her stepfather after suffering a catastrophic accident (“you came in with your jaw torn, still talking”), along with the vivid memories of technicalities that tend to stick with trauma sufferers. Quinlan remembers things like the chicken in the oven before arriving to the hospital and seeing nurses playing poker while a blind man convalesces in the next bed over. The account of a family friend’s death on the rollicking roots-rocker “Sally II” starts with a literally breathtaking mention of “that unsettling smell had gotten into all the tenants’ rooms,” and it’s the mundane forensic details that are even more unnerving: the apartment is littered with weightlifting magazines and a piece of junk mail with a fake million-dollar check (“you thought it was the real thing”).
Get Disowned is a meditation on death and loss every bit as compelling as Southeastern, Benji, or Carrie & Lowell, and boasts more inventive language than any of them. But Hop Along, in part because the project was so new, initially had a harder time getting noticed. And while Quinlan’s voice is unusually expressive—she often screams and restrains herself at the same time, so it sounds like her lungs might burst—it rarely sounds objectively sad in a way that immediately conveys gravitas or fragility to a casual listener. Play “Sally II” at a party, ask a friend what it’s about and see how close they get to “an older man dying alone in his apartment.”
The record’s most pressing issue may be one that was hit upon in an interview with Quinlan and her brother Mark, Hop Along’s drummer. Frances described the prevailing theme of Get Disowned as “baggage,” to which Mark added, “not being able to have your mistakes written off just because you’re young.” Right there, the siblings touched the nerve that rightfully triggers a shudder in anyone who’s been the target of all those “why can’t these entitled millennials just wash their cereal bowls like we did in the good ol’ days?”-style pieces, written by someone who refuses to take ownership of the degraded world they’ve left for the younger generation. It feels like the Quinlans were speaking to how people can be seriously damaged by their youth and still not be taken seriously.
Sure, kids might learn to process and turn these experiences into assets—“Hop Along” itself was a nickname given to Quinlan in high school for being a slow walker. Or they may repress them and have them mutate into something uglier and intractable that continues throughout their lives. Even if a middle-schooler is aware of what’s at stake in the upcoming presidential election or reads an article about Flint’s water crisis, if they got picked on at school, that’s probably the most important thing in the world to them right now. Get Disowned lends dignity to the truth that each person’s struggle and recovery is theirs, regardless of how it may present to outsiders or how it seems relative to more pervasive and global concerns. As Hop Along would soon find out, the first step to a breakthrough is just to be heard.


Mitski’s sixth album is an austere, nuanced, and disaffected indie-pop record that, in part, addresses her turbulent relationship with her own career.

Laurel Hell

Mitski sees the world with the ruthless, knowing gaze of someone who grew up too fast. Her cutting acuity is part of what inspires rapture from her fans, who speak about her as if she’s the only person who has ever understood them. It is also what makes her wary of even the most sincere adoration, insisting on distance between herself and her audience. When a fan at a concert screams “I love you,” Mitski, straining to say the truth kindly, replies with pity: “You don’t know me.”
But Mitski thinks the world of her audience too, because they are the reason that she gets to make music. “Thank you all for saving my life,” she addresses the crowd at the end of her show. All of her intensity serves this one creative pursuit, the most remarkable and doomed relationship of her life. For her dreams, she made the usual exorbitant sacrifices: cramming in gig after gig, forgoing a stable residence or health insurance, abandoning other interests or friends. “I will neglect everything else, including me as a person, just to get to keep making music,” she told Pitchfork, ahead of the release of her ascendant fifth album Be the Cowboy, in 2018. By then, she seemed to have made it. She could do music full-time. She could pay for insurance. “Now my goal is to only make music that I feel is necessary for me to make,” she said.
What happens when you realize your dreams and still feel unhappy? On “Working for the Knife,” the arresting lead single and guiding light of her sixth album, Laurel Hell, Mitski reckons with the idea that the grind wasn’t worth it: “I always thought the choice was mine/And I was right, but I just chose wrong.” The song opens with cold, droning synths and clinks that sound like spikes hammered into railroad tracks. It is incredibly potent, filled with contradiction and unease; Mitski’s cool voice intersects with a piano line that sounds slightly off-key, and a clanging guitar springs in suddenly. “At 29, the road ahead appears the same,” she sings, before pivoting to a small, perhaps futile, note of hope. “Maybe at 30, I’ll see a way to change.”
“Working for the Knife” was written in late 2019 after Mitski had left social media and privately decided to quit the music business. Then she realized her label contract required her to make one last album. Instead of handing in Laurel Hell quietly and disappearing, she committed to promoting it, sitting for profiles and reacting to tweets on camera; if it’s not enough to headline her own 48-stop solo tour, she will also be opening arenas for Harry Styles. “Sometimes I think I am free/Until I find I’m back in line again,” she acknowledges on the low-pulsing “Everyone,” before piano chords that glitter like chandeliers whisk the song to a more beautiful place. The album doesn’t shy from Mitski’s disaffectedness, which is apparent even in the vocals, delivered with less brio than on, say, Puberty 2. On “Stay Soft,” Mitski revives the snappy disco of “Nobody” and suggests that numbness is inevitable for someone just trying to survive: “You stay soft, get eaten/Only natural to harden up.”
The songs on Laurel Hell are wispy, less image-dense than before; the longest line in “I Guess,” for example, is six words, like it was written on the back of a napkin. One blazing counterpoint is “Heat Lightning,” a languid ballad about insomnia that sounds like the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs.” “Sleeping eyelid of the sky/Flutters in a dream,” Mitski sings, a spectacular and vivid portrait of 4 a.m. consciousness. Gazing out the window at a liminal hour, she anticipates an oncoming storm, observing trees “swaying in the wind, like sea anemones.” The sweltering air dissipates and the song catches a drift. Hours of restless contemplation lead Mitski to the realization that she must abandon her chosen path, and she sings tenderly, almost religiously: “I surrender.”
The other standout on Laurel Hell is more menacing, less relieved. Opener “Valentine, Texas” introduces us to the album’s abiding metaphor: Mitski returning to her rightful place in the dark. “I’ll show you who my sweetheart’s never met,” she sings, flashing a version of herself that’s brutish like an animal, all “wet teeth, shining eyes.” At first the song is disquietingly minimal, but in a classic Mitski move, it erupts in the middle; the music swirls and coruscates like a snow globe. Hoping a shift in perspective will ease her heaviness, Mitski longs to drive out to where clouds are shaped like mountains: “Let me watch those mountains from underneath,” she sings, “And maybe they’ll finally/Float off of me.”
In press for Laurel Hell, Mitski has distanced herself from the aims of her prior album, where she consciously pivoted to short fiction to prove that her songs were more than confessional outpourings. “I don’t want to make another Be the Cowboy,” she’s said. “I didn’t want to make music that was putting up walls against the listener.” This framing is somewhat misleading because Laurel Hell isn’t necessarily more transparent or revelatory than its predecessor—and in between the woeful reflections on her relationship to music, there are sketches of romantic turbulence that read like stories. “Should’ve Been Me,” a foot-tapping number with Hall & Oates’ blue-eyed pep, could be a sequel to 2018’s arresting “A Pearl”: the partner of an emotionally lost woman can’t break through to her, and so they seek love from someone who’s her spitting image. On “The Only Heartbreaker,” co-written with pop hitmaker Dan Wilson, someone wishes their lover would just fuck up just once, so they’re relieved from always being the bad guy.
It’s an odd coincidence that Laurel Hell contains some of the most commercial-sounding work of Mitski’s career while in interviews she’s wrestled against the industry’s need to distill and market her. In the latter half of Laurel Hell, including on “The Only Heartbreaker,” she embraces ’80s synth-pop so stadium-bright that a collaboration with the Weeknd doesn’t seem that far off. You could argue the flash and bang serves a meta-purpose, like on “Love Me More,” in which Mitski frantically pleads for more nourishment, more reciprocation, just more. “Drown it out, drown me out,” she demands, and the blinding synths fulfill her wishes. But the production has the ultimate effect of anonymizing her, subsuming a first-class songwriter into a tired palette. Mitski has long maintained she values words and melody over instrumentation, and the choices on Laurel Hell can feel like a misuse of her talent.
Laurel Hell went through several iterations over three years, which may explain why the end product feels a bit scattered: big pop numbers next to slow, ambient-leaning passages, narrative capsules next to more plain disclosures. To say that it is the least compelling of her Dead Oceans records is also to acknowledge the stratospheric standard she has set. Laurel Hell still has wrenching lines and artful melodies, proof that Mitski’s every move operates at a baseline level of virtuosity. The existence of the album in and of itself feels climactic. Mitski’s fantasies of leaving music, of destroying everything, didn’t happen overnight. “[If] I could just be a normal healthy person with a regular job, I would do that in a heartbeat,” she told the New York Times in 2016. “I would love to be just happy.”
Of course, it’s never that easy. In the last few minutes of Laurel Hell, Mitski forlornly announces the end, and then reveals her farewell to be the album’s penultimate track. “You say you love me/I believe you do,” Mitski sings on the real closer, “That’s Our Lamp.” “But I walk down and up and down/And up and down this street/’Cause you just don’t like me/Not like you used to.” It plays like a classic lover’s quarrel, set to jubilant disco in the vein of “Dancing Queen.” The mood all but guarantees a happy ending, and you can predict how this one goes: Mitski and music, the remarkable and doomed lovers, giving things one last shot.

Buy: Rough Trade


Trevor Powers has long shown a penchant for reinvention, but his first album as Youth Lagoon in eight years feels like a homecoming; he’s never sounded so confident or at peace with himself.

Heaven Is a Junkyard

Trevor Powers has reinvented himself with every release. Across his first three albums as Youth Lagoon, he moved from small-town innocence to cosmopolitan experimentalism and hip-hop low end, and on to a bellicose clarity born out of personal tragedy. Then, in dramatic terms, he ended the project. On his first album under his own name, he embraced jagged, industrial-noise dread; on the second, after a scary real-life panic attack, he disappeared almost completely into found-sound abstraction.
Through a dozen years of shifting sounds and trends, Powers has remained faithful to the fundamentals of chamber pop: tunes that stick in your head and arrangements grand enough to get lost in. Also key: his cryptic existential musings, which he delivers in a voice as high and craggy as the Idaho backcountry near his hometown, Boise. His first album under the Youth Lagoon alias in eight years, Heaven Is a Junkyard, channels those familiar qualities into a reinvention that feels like a homecoming. The old anxiety and morbid fascination remain, but Powers has never sounded so confident, so at peace within himself.
Powers has teamed up this time with producer Rodaidh McDonald, whose stately electronic flourishes for artists like Gil Scott-Heron and the xx are echoed here. They achieve a sound that feels at once lush and spacious; synths, lap steel, and unorthodox percussion adorn unhurried songs that revolve around Powers’ rickety piano and quavering vocals, now free of the foggy reverb that cloaked the earliest Youth Lagoon records, but sometimes digitally treated, in keeping with his later solo work. The lyrics are as elliptical as ever, with lurid glimpses of the hardboiled 1950s crime fiction Powers admires, but they also seem more grounded in his particular Mountain West setting and strict Christian upbringing. The resulting catharsis is less a primal scream than a prayerful revelation.
Heaven Is a Junkyard follows another traumatic experience for Powers, an excruciating over-the-counter drug reaction that dragged on for eight months and temporarily robbed him of his voice. Late-album track “Trapeze Artist” addresses his recent plight with harrowing directness, but through indie pop so jubilant that by the time a guest choir sings, “Jesus, please take the pain,” it feels like a hallelujah. Lead single “Idaho Alien” paints a grim scene of self-harm that Powers acknowledges as his way of coping with feeling trapped in his own body during the illness, but its jaunty, observational air could fit anyone who feels out of place. The extraterrestrial theme seems especially apt for a singer whose ethereal vocals—once evoking Daniel Johnston, now and then verging on Jónsi—have always scanned as otherworldly.
Heaven Is a Junkyard powerfully conveys a sense of renewal. On serene opener “Rabbit,” between Alice in Wonderland references and intimations of violent conflict, he sings about “a 1980 Ford” like an older, wiser version of the kid on one of Youth Lagoon’s earliest songs who was “rolling up the windows of my ’96 Buick.” The type of vocal manipulation that Powers explored to menacing effect on 2018’s Mulberry Violence recurs toward the end of this album on “Mercury,” only here it’s for a cello-swept anthem that asks about (and sounds like) a heavenly glow.
At its best, Heaven Is a Junkyard is up there with anything in Youth Lagoon’s catalog. The radiant electronic pop of “Prizefighter,” which wouldn’t have been out of place on 2013’s Wondrous Bughouse, spins an engrossing family narrative drawn from Powers’ background as one of four homeschooled brothers; a line like, “Now all I want is fun,” hits different after a verse about a brother “who left for war with no goodbyes … ’cause he thought I’d see him cry.” The album’s centerpiece, “The Sling,” which features prolific violinist Rob Moose, feels like a breakthrough. Powers’ lyrics are terse but packed with arresting phrases—“Time would bend/Like a drunken tree,” he sings—en route to an eerie yet tender declaration: “Heaven is a junkyard/And it’s my home.” Like a contemporary Huck Finn, Powers’ narrator seeks a salvation that lies beyond what traditionalist authorities preach.
To acknowledge that flawed human beings living in the fucked-up here and now are capable of beauty and goodness may be a useful corrective to reflexive disillusionment, but it’s no guarantee of happiness. “Love is the promise that someday you’ll lose,” Powers sings with devastating certainty on the graceful finale, “Helicopter Toy.” With Heaven Is a Junkyard, he seems to have found himself anew by doing what he has always done, pursuing his musical curiosity in previously unexplored directions. On one of his earliest and most enduring songs, “17,” from 2011’s The Year of Hibernation, he sang of his mom telling him, “Don’t stop imagining/The day that you do is the day that you die.” Youth Lagoon lives.


The guitarist and composer leads his adventurous backing band through immersive instrumentals, creating a tranquil atmosphere from classical minimalism, ambient synth, and nimble fusion.

Recumbent Speech

Recumbent Speech invites you to a world so vivid and intricately textured that you might feel like you are part of it. “Acquainted With the Night,” named after a Robert Frost poem, opens with the sound of Ezra Feinberg’s fingerpicked acoustic guitar, recorded closely enough to hear his fingers brush the strings. The sense of solitude in tight quarters doesn’t last long: Soon, he is surrounded by synth, flute, piano, and fretless bass—a cosmic pastoral landscape, not far from the ones Popol Vuh played to soundtrack Werner Herzog movies in the ’70s. Feinberg’s hypnotic, wordless compositions grow this way, one instrument at a time, letting you settle in before he sweeps you away.
In the 2000s, Feinberg led the San Francisco band Citay. Across three records, the collective drew on styles that were largely unfashionable in indie music: soft rock, jam bands, new age. Ten years since the release of their last album, their earnest embrace of these genres feels ahead of its time. “I don’t feel a need to distance myself from anything I like,” he explained in 2006. “If anything, I want to bring myself (and my bandmates, as well as my friends and family) closer to everything I like.” The same way that artists like Jim O’Rourke or Oneohtrix Point Never return to a distinct set of influences through their myriad releases, Feinberg seemed to create a canon within his own work. You could count the references, but you’d lose track of the feeling: a radiant sense of positivity drawn from the most meditative corners of his record collection.
His second solo album since disbanding Citay and moving to Brooklyn, Recumbent Speech is his most distinct and embracing work. He still draws on many of those same influences, but his work is less tethered to his versatile guitar playing. He is an expert bandleader, guiding a group of like-minded musicians to bring each composition to life. At other times, he is more like a free-form DJ. These six songs are unified by their slow-building serenity and enveloping atmosphere, maintaining a singular mood while Feinberg jumps between genres and influences. Minimalist classical explorations sit beside campfire folk strumming; ambient synths give way to nimble fusion. No two songs sound quite alike, and each of them might feel like the centerpiece on any given listen.
To match his wide-spanning vision, Feinberg enlisted a compact but adventurous backing band. Among his accompanists are Tortoise drummer John McEntire, pedal steel player Chuck Johnson, synth composer Jonas Reinhardt, and vocalists April Haley and Mandy Green. These singers draw a clear line to Feinberg’s utopian work in Citay, their harmonies adding a sense of calm to the moody “Ovation.” But three minutes in, at the point where a Citay song might have burst into a guitar solo, the music drops completely, leaving just a bed of ambience and Feinberg’s amplifier feedback. When the band returns from the quiet, they sound slower and heavier, like they are carrying a great weight behind them.
The record shines through these emotional twists in Feinberg’s compositions and his accompanists’ performances. If Feinberg’s inspiration once came from bringing the styles he loved to as many people as possible, Recumbent Speech draws on the deeper connections from a lifetime of music discovery: the memories those songs conjure, the people we meet through our shared passion, the way an old favorite might sound different under new circumstances. For all his crate-digging tendencies, Feinberg returns again and again to a simple goal: to soothe our worries and guide us somewhere better.

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Wolf Parade have cleaned up further on their streamlined new record, making for solid throwback indie rock.

Cry Cry Cry

It stands to reason most listeners who encounter Cry Cry Cry had some real moments with 2005’s “I’ll Believe in Anything”—not just a song that defined Wolf Parade, but an entire era when scrappy bands with bristling guitars, raw-throated vocalists, janky synths, and dog-eared thesauruses all believed in something profound and abstract. They sounded like they were punching far above indie rock’s weight because they really could be thrust from obscurity to relative stardom. It doesn’t quite feel that way anymore, and perhaps it’s fitting that “2005 indie” or pre-blog rock—whatever you want to call it—is having its best year since, well, 2005. Everyone from the National to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sound rejuvenated. Then again, just as many may look back on that time as one where indie rock started to lose its countercultural power and became a quirky, cerebral lifestyle accessory, inextricable from McSweeney’s or Wes Anderson movies. But both sides will likely agree on Cry Cry Cry: that’s indie rock right there.
It makes for a sensible followup to last year’s EP 4, a four-song teaser that functioned better as an accessory to their reunion shows than a substantial addition to the Wolf Parade catalog. It proved that Wolf Parade still had access to the raw materials of their beloved 2005 debut Apologies to the Queen Mary: the earnestness of implacable “heartland rock,” abrasive synths, a smattering of prog pageantry, all cautiously portioned out. You could dutifully tap your foot to “Mr. Startup” or “C’est La Vie Way.” EP 4 just wanted to make sure you were still interested.
Wolf Parade hardly lack for inspiration this time around. Lead single “Valley Boy” finally makes good on EP 4’s promise of a glam-rock retooling, boasting the album’s most ostentatious hook before tipping numerous hats to Leonard Cohen (“you finally became that bird on that wire”). And like all bands in 2017, if Boeckner or Krug were to tell you that any of the more sinister or dour lyrics were political, you’d have to believe them. “Lazarus Online” introduces Cry Cry Cry with its most startling line—“I received your message/You’re a fan of mine/Your name’s Rebecca and you’ve decided not to die.” It’s strikingly similar to a much-maligned lyric from Arcade Fire’s “Creature Comfort”, but unlike their peers in Canada’s mid-2000s ruling class, Wolf Parade aren’t operating from an elevated platform. They may not be in love with the modern world, but they’ve got to live in it like the rest of us, experiencing reality like a sleepless night continually bordering on nightmare. “I’m up all night with the Century Ghosts,” Boeckner barks on the somnambulant sprint “You’re Dreaming.”
Which is to say, this feels like a Wolf Parade album. And once the hiccuping synths kick in on “You’re Dreaming” or “Artificial Life,” it sure sounds like a Wolf Parade album, too. But rather than recapture their early spark—Krug and Boeckner’s vocals toppling over each other, some production grit, a sense that there was conflict or something at stake—Wolf Parade have cleaned up further with production from John Goodmanson. For the most part, Wolf Parade’s synths have matured into pianos, precision drumming, and while Boeckner and Krug have instantly recognizable voices, it’s getting tougher to tell them apart. The result is a more coherent and streamlined record than the previous two, but it likewise echoes Apologies to the Queen Mary enough to present its shortcomings in stark relief.
Wolf Parade are now practical and proficient, more similar to latter-day Spoon cuts than Boeckner’s actual work with Britt Daniel in Divine Fits. Oddly enough, Wolf Parade’s focus is a liability on Cry Cry Cry’s requisite prog-epics. “Baby Blue” and “Weaponized” stretch out past six minutes but do so by cycling in place, lacking the peculiarities that validated the spacious structures of “Kissing the Beehive” or “Dinner Bells.” And in the record’s one truly confounding move, they’re stuck back-to-back as an almost 13-minute valley Wolf Parade spend the rest of Side B admirably trying to crawl and shimmy their way out of.
But once they do, with the admirably vigorous “King of Piss and Paper,” Cry Cry Cry can be heard as an equal to At Mount Zoomer or Expo 86: a solid record, throwback indie rock by default, powered less by defiant belief than muted reliability. Boeckner and Krug’s hearts were on fire on their debut and ever since, that passion has burned just as hot in their other endeavors. And yet, when the two realign on subsequent Wolf Parade records, the results have been workmanlike in all aspects: admirable, handsomely crafted, and ultimately defined by how much they sounded like work.


Producer William Harrison King puts quantity before quality on this free, 30-track compilation of sketches, demos, and experiments whose most exciting moments highlight his flair for minimalist composition.

Sharp Veins: detritus preterit selections

detritus preterit selections

The disjointed club music William Harrison King makes as Sharp Veins may sound unruly, but when it comes to his recorded output, the Alabama-born, New York-based producer has tended to privilege quality over quantity. He got his break on a 2014 compilation for the influential grime label and party Boxed, under the moniker William Skeng. The next year, Sharp Veins’ debut EP Inbox Island blended dizzying, bass-heavy club bangers, grime, drone, ambient, and Southern hip-hop into a seamless and euphoric whole.
The project resurfaced last year with a second EP, bleeds colors and puddles. Released on UNO NYC, the dance label best known for putting out early works by Arca and Mykki Blanco, it found Sharp Veins’ style growing even more difficult to pin down. Lush chromatic synths collided with beats carved down from over-processed samples (including one that sounded like a nasty cough) with a newfound liquid ease. Expectations flip even further on detritus preterit selections (which essentially translates as “selected old junk”), a free, 30-track compilation of sketches, demos, experiments, and hidden gems that runs nearly two and a half hours. This warts-and-all document of King’s process offers plenty of satisfying moments and some genuine surprises.
Many of the album’s tracks (whose titles include such straight-off-the-laptop labels as “[ROUGH],” “[demo],” and even “shitty mixdown”) feel like intriguing passages from incomplete songs, but part of the fun is in listening as cuts that start out as duds abruptly explode into greatness. “Misplaced my nostalgia” meanders at first, then bursts into an ever-unfolding rush of synths, while opener “across the cfloor v2 v1” careens wildly from drones to crashing grime before introducing a chirpy hook. Tracks can hit with the maximalist shimmer of Rustie, the whip-crack sweetness of PC Music, or the warped elasticity of vaporwave pioneers like Vektroid.
Many of the best compositions, however, showcase King’s less explored flair for minimalism. Sharp Veins’ mix for the Truants series revealed a deep appreciation for ambient music, lacing his own tracks through pieces by GAS, Grouper, and William Basinski, and he explores that sound in more depth here. More an abstract painting than a rough sketch, “drawing” deploys gorgeously curling synths without ever chasing a melody. “couldnt sleep v1 [137]” buries waves of drone and noise on top of each other to soothing effect. The album’s finest moment comes on “little worm,” in which King delicately handles a single shard of sound—a digital blip that flutters like the dying breaths of one of the Disintegration Loops—until a thunderous bassline shatters the glassy atmosphere.
Detritus lacks the airtight pacing and precision of Sharp Veins’ EPs, but that’s the point. The quantity-over-quality scale and low stakes that come with releasing a free compilation give King the space to chase inspirations and test the edges of his sound. He even finds a powerful singing voice, channeling a young, distortion-bathed Jamie Stewart on the penultimate track, “lets wash our hands v3 [150].” It’s a moment that makes you see earlier tracks in a new light: The standout “crshed like a toad v1” is sweet and sharp in all the ways Xiu Xiu are, and “wash our hands” reinforces that link in a way that feels almost subconscious.
It’s surprising connections like this one that make the uneven release worth digging through. “Take these, the preterit, as a sort of ‘this is what i’ve been doing while i’ve been quiet’ then we can all move on,” King instructs listeners on Bandcamp. It’s hard to say what Sharp Veins will be moving on to, but detritus preterit selections suggests a virtually limitless field of possibilities.


Though the Philadelphia experimental poet and sound artist has called this her most “accessible” album, her aims remain as radical as ever.

Moor Mother: Black Encyclopedia of the Air

Black Encyclopedia of the Air

Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, has spent the better part of a decade becoming the poet laureate of the apocalypse. So it’s strange to hear the Philadelphia sound artist say, “I ain’t got to fight no more.” Threaded through rolling drums and the squealing upward climb of a violin, the phrase that weaves Black Encyclopedia of the Air closer “Clock Fight” together seems to contradict a ferocious legacy of blurring past, present, and future into hissing indictments of history that still left room for hope. After years of chronicling the advent of armageddon, could the war really be over? She’s joked about calling this album her “sell-out” record, and it’s true that the collection of beats and soundscapes that she’s assembled with collaborator Olof Melander is her most accessible yet, but could Moor Mother really be hanging up her sword?
Ayewa has been locked in combat against the oppressive ideology of linear time for years, and she knows how to punch through the pain. To her, time travel is a birthright. Every tick of the clock flattens the spirit, surrendering our naturally fluid understanding of time as we march along—mindlessly, without empathy—in service of capital. Make no mistake: The battle has left her weary. Opener “Temporal Control of Light Echoes” wastes no time letting you know how it felt to “fight through crowds of humiliation,” only to find herself in a “gathering of bones,” and the smooth rhythms of “Mangrove” do little to cushion the blow of realizing that she “no longer see[s] the shadows of what made me strong.” But when she leans into a venomous groan on “Clock Fight,” rattling off her struggles against “the master’s clock,” “the rich clock,” and “the clock of democracy,” what you hear isn’t resignation or defeat. It’s a catalog of vanquished foes, an ever-expanding list of victories. Black Encyclopedia of the Air is another withering salvo in Moor Mother’s lifelong war of attrition, expertly disguised behind the shadow of a white flag.
For an artist who consistently drapes her work in the language of astronomy, it’s surprising how little space Ayewa has indulged on previous albums. Moor Mother records are typically dense affairs: Crowded with samples and harsh noise, shot through with jazz and body horror, they pound the psyche into a malleable putty. Here, she takes her time, touring through soft interstellar clouds before the inevitable turn into a sonic black hole.

After “Temporal Control of Light Echoes” straps you in, a looping sample of the word “respira” reminds you to breathe. Heed the warning: Though the album drifts into an eight-song stretch of dreamy beats and languid bass, Moor Mother condenses her grim symphony of voices into bite-sized movements that fly by at a satisfying clip. Expanding into the newfound void, Ayewa pulls off a remarkable transformation by sidestepping the abstract and rooting herself firmly in rhythm. It’s no secret that Ayewa can dance around a beat, but her laser focus on rap and R&B phrasing here pays off. Listening to her slide in effortlessly after Elucid’s opening verse on “Mangrove” is thrilling. Witnessing her construct an honest-to-god pop hook on “Shekere,” bouncing through the title’s syllables with a disarming lightness, is even better. That Ayewa sounds just as fluid trading rapid-fire verses with Nappy Nina and Maassai on “Made a Circle” as she does solemnly conjuring the memory of ancestors in a healing spell one track later, on “Tarot,” is mesmerizing.
These more hospitable sounds only heighten the vertigo that occurs when Ayewa lets her well-honed experimental chops take over in the album’s third act. Soundtracked by a churning, hallucinatory beat that squeezes around the mix, “Nighthawk of Time” flashes the alarm: “The clock is for watching you/Not the other way around.” Album highlight “Zami” slams the brakes, crashing directly into the kind of distorted bass drum and grinding synthesizers that could have kicked off any of her previous albums, but arrive now with a chilling sense of finality. She drives a knife into the heart of temporality, pushing it deeper with every screamed “What the fuck you say?” before collapsing into a vacuum of silence. As “Clock Fight” enters with fiery percussion, it feels like the dramatic revelation of a hero surviving a confrontation with their archnemesis.
Black Encyclopedia of the Air’s bold theatricality is perhaps a natural outgrowth of Ayewa’s work creating the 2019 multimedia play Circuit City. There, she activated the “liberation technology” of free jazz to unpack the ongoing urban housing crisis, meditating on capitalism’s ultimate sin of hoarding not only material resources, but time itself. Black Encyclopedia of the Air extends and deepens her commitment to unmasking the surreal forces operating within and around us. Though she’s found a way to make the pill a little easier to swallow, Moor Mother re-emerges from her DIY time machine offering nothing but the bitter truth: Everything must change.

Buy: Rough Trade
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